Our teenage room

Every year, without fail, I tell myself, I am not going back home for Christmas.

Then I negotiate with myself, and it boils down to “Ok, I am going, but not for the entire thing, one week tops”. And it is precisely then, when I start to feel confident that 1 week is the right thing to do, 1 week is good, 1 week is “daughter who loves them to bits but has a life”, it is then that I always find myself dragging a big bag to the gate for Milan. Somehow, as if I had no will whatsoever.

A few hours later, I am waving at my father, who has called as soon as I landed to tell me, “You find me at the same place, ok? The one at the exit close to the end of the hotel”. I know where the damn spot is by now, because he repeats this phone call whenever I go back home, and he picks me up. It has been 7 years now, and we repeat this scene. My father is getting older; perhaps he needs a routine just like children. I wonder if perhaps he is not scared of me getting lost as much as he is scared of not being found. Are we playing hide and seek, Dad?. Then I think of the eventuality of a day when he won’t come to pick me up, he will no longer be here, and I try to cool off my nerves. This is the terrible thing about parents: their mortality dilutes the annoyance you’d rightfully like to show.

And while I change radio channels at an ungodly speed, I always ask myself what I am seeking whenever I am back here and why I moved km away, why did I put a language barrier? Perhaps to be finally attuned to myself? I needed silence, and there was none when I needed it back then, and there was too much silence instead when I craved for another voice to calm me down, when this room was my reign. I moved away to find a form of harmony between what they wanted and what I wanted for myself.

Study the past to understand the present, they say. And that’s what my teenage room is. It is a museum. The luckiest people have a museum that contains a blend of historical eras. The ones who found that living abroad was the only way to build their personhood, find only a room that reminds them how their past here was a long, unchanged series of similar days. The dullness of it. It was a series of nights and days fantasising about a life elsewhere.

This room asks now: Did you find the answers to those questions that pushed you so far away?

Nothing changes in your teenage room. Posters, some pictures stuck on the edges of a mirror, the books you liked and the ones you never returned to a friend, stuffed toys, old boxes with letters, and CDs. The permanence of it is always ready to measure you up.

Were your parents the tyrannical leaders who waged war on you? Or you waged war on the parents you needed, and they could not be? Are you ready to make peace with them, now that they are too old to fight? Are you ready to grant forgiveness they may never ask? Were they really the dictators you made them to be, or was it a battle against yourself? Were those friends who stayed wiser than you or just content with less? Is it wiser to be content with less? Or was their “less” something you had to earn? Like belonging and a group of people who’d finally make you feel understood?

That room asks so many questions, and if you are lucky, you can finally reply to it: “I went far enough to know, everywhere I go, I am home. I am the parent I deserved. I am the city that could make me grow”. That’s what happened to me. Now, my teenage room is a place where I eat way more than I should, where my Balkan father comes with freshly cut fruits, not the form of apology I craved, but the only one he can muster. It is a place where I read books without placing a timer. It is a place where I just am. After all these years and efforts, I managed to make this history museum of a room into a contemporary arts one. Contemporary art, for the most part, sucks, but it does not carry as much baggage from the past. It is a win.

Some of us earn our present. Some of us walk miles before our teenage room stops being a museum of sadness.

Vilma Djala