It had been known for years that the moment I moved out would be the moment that my mom finally gained the art room that she always wanted. She would remove all of my possessions to make room for her own and then forbid anyone from going into "her" room.
I had no problem with this in the beginning. I really didn't spend much time in my room. I chose to sleep out on the couch in the living room where the air conditioner was located. It didn't help that I was constantly sick. I had to sleep sitting up, else I'd spend the entire night coughing, and my bed wasn't really useful for that.
In this moment, I wish I could throw every marker and stamp that my mother has in my old bedroom and take it back.
When we originally moved into this house, my sister was about to attend college. They morphed the attic into a bedroom for when she returned home and it remained generally clean. Then she left. Dad started to move his radios and general junk up into the room. Zak moved back in to live there for a few months, followed by Jessica and Miranda moving in for another six months. After they were gone, the attic became the storage shed. We have boxes after boxes cluttering the room and making it ridiculously hard to move around in.
That is now my bedroom. My father has been getting on my case all week about it not being clean up there. In reality, it is clean. I just don't have a dresser or a closet to put my belongings in. The floor is the only spot that was open when I walked in with everything from my dorm room.
I could stand this. I could arrange things, playing real life tetris until things fit. That was actually my plan until I started to implement it today. I found dead ants on the stairway, dead bees near the trash can, and everything coated in a layer of dust. I'm already half-sick and have a bad case of asthma; I'm not going to be living in a place that my immune system cannot handle.
Dave's going to help me clean today because I started crying with frustration while I was upstairs.
Even my dorm room was better than this, and that had black mold.
