Waxing nostalgic, because that's what you do when you sleep in your old bedroom.

Going through old pictures this week, I found a snapshot of my room right before I left for college. My little 10 x 10 space had reached perfection at that point. The saltillo tile pleased me to no end, cool and pleasantly worn in, with a footprint, said to be good luck by those who know these things, pressed into one square by a passing coyote when the clay was drying down in Mexico.

My bookshelves, loosely alphabetized, bore the fruit of years of thrift store culling. The shelves themselves were yard sale discoveries; the one in the picture was actually free at a Memorial Day sale in Idyllwild. I sanded and restained them myself, matching them to the dresser I'd used without fail since I was born, which featured a changing table on top that I used to hide my treasures in when I was in elementary school.



And then I had to unceremoniously pack it all up and leave. Much as I would have liked the room to remain a shrine to myself, I realized that wasn't going to happen. My younger sister Rachel got her own room for the first time in her life, and I was definitely happy for her, but she couldn't entirely efface the remnants of the room's previous occupant, and for that I was glad as well. The walls are still "London fog blue," and the quotations I inscribed in a light grey still float subtly in the background.

A couple of years ago, I became enchanted with the idea of surrounding myself with words. I collected phrases from some of my favorite literary figures, and together they form a fairly comprehensive portrait of my philosophy on life at the time.



"We live, in fact, in a world starved for solitude, silence, and private: and therefore starved for meditation and true friendship," said C.S. Lewis. I was a lonely, lonely kid throughout my adolescence, and so Lewis was one of my best friends. I like to think I've grown out of that, but I'll never forget what that felt like and what comfort these words gave to me.

"I'm just going to write because I cannot help it," Charlotte Brontë declared to her detractors. "Let other pens dwell on guilt and misery," Jane Austen wrote in Mansfield Park. I was resolved to do the same: to write ineluctably, and to write of things that made me happy, in a word.

"In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God." So begins the gospel of John. This verse, more than any other, I think, embodied my view of Christianity. Aside from my obsession with words, I delighted here in metaphor, and not just any metaphor, but one that found an exquisite culmination of the Greek pursuit of knowledge and wisdom in the salvation of Christ.

So that's who I was. That's who am I still, really; I don't think I've changed fundamentally since I was 16. If anything, I've just become more myself.