Back In My Dorm Room

My favorite place is anywhere where I can be alone.  I am grateful for the privacy, away from eyes, away from temptation, away from any unwanted outside stimulus.   It will be easy to pack this room up when I leave, since I brought nothing with me that says home; no pictures or cards on the dresser or walls.  You take out my clothes and my laptop and the place is ready for a new student.  That isn’t entirely true.  I have one treasured possession, a Victorian trinket box.  It’s ironic that I own a trinket box since I wouldn’t dream of putting anything in it.  It’s a beautiful and curious thing; most likely fake but I imagine it has a history.  To put something of mine in it would change that history, make it personal to me.  It seems to me that that would diminish the value of it; not that I have any cherished “trinkets” to stick in there.

I toss my book-heavy bag onto my bed.  The sun’s been down over an hour and it depresses the hell out of me.  I suppose I should be excited about going home for break, as that is “normal,” but Christmases stopped being fun when I was thirteen.  I don’t remember most of them after that.  I can’t imagine a better break than trying to break down the ‘emotions of reason’ behind Gary Ridgeway.  I don’t mean that sarcastically.

I open my bag of books and pull them out onto my bed to get to work and find that I must have someone else’s bag.  I recognize my laptop and there is the file from Mannesh but none of these books are about Gary.  Autumn of Terror, The Women of Whitechapel, Whitechapel Murderer, The Lodger, Diary of Jack the Riper, Jack the Ripper: First American Serial Killer.  Where are my books?   Why are these here?”

I push them, one by one, off my bed and onto the floor.  On one book’s cover there’s a Victorian-era woman, her back to us, as she heads down a cobblestone street towards darkness and shadow.  My eyes travel down the street ahead of her in the book, into those shadows.  The winter cold cuts through me again as if my window is open.  It isn’t.  My room folds into darkness and there’s a man here now arguing with a woman.  She is pleading with him,  “Does it not matter that I’m sleepin’ rough every night, Bill?”  She’s English—cockney. “What do I do without that three shillin’s a week?”  He explodes back at her, “It’s by your own hand.  You left me, Polly; the lads, Alice, your little Sarah, for your drink.”  She drops to her knees, “Three bloody shillin’s.”  He pushes her away and goes to my desk drawer—no, his desk drawer.  “Here is four and six.  Never come back to this house again. I don’t want the children to see you, I never—” He stops mid-sentence and looks directly at me. “What are you doin’ there?”  He starts pounding on the desk demanding an answer.

The pounding continues and I am back in my room.  I still hear the pounding—knocking.  Someone is knocking at my door.  “What are you doing in there, Miranda?”  It’s Angela.  I open the door to let her in.  “I’ve been knocking for twenty minutes.” Twenty minutes?  “Who were you yelling at?”  I tell her I must have fallen asleep.   She looks at me with disbelief.  Can you blame her?  “Those are some loud dreams, girl”

Yes, they are.