Prompt: Talk about your childhood bedroom. Did you share? Slam the door? Let someone in you shouldn’t have? Where did you hide things?

When I dream about my room, it always goes back to the way it was.

Peopled with stuffed animals and alive with their spirit, I remember color and magic and fantasy: Books, art supplies, changing wallpaper and wall colors, posters and wall hangings and all the little objects that meant something to me–

The way the sun would cast patterns like fine lace on the walls and bedspread, coming in through the trees outside the windows, white curtains billowing;

Plastering the outside of my door with giant police phone box paper and alternately pretending my room was the TARDIS or a Computer Complex Center (I had a C64) housed in the middle of a forest planet;

Amateur singing hour when I first discovered I had a voice–and also fell in love with the Phantom of the Opera and played the entire Andrew Lloyd Webber cast recording over and over;

Arranging and rearranging treasured bits of glass, ceramic, and wood, and once a large brass-and-crystal scale that stole into a poem I wrote at the time;

Being convinced there were secret passageways if only I could find them, or wake up at just the right time when all the magic was at its highest in the night.

By today’s standards, my bedroom would probably be sneered at as too small by today’s house hunters, but I know I was lucky. I had my world all to myself.

My refuge, my stage, my TARDIS; I loved my room.