A place that is special to me, as cliché as it sounds, would have to be my room. All throughout my life my family and I have moved from house to house pretty consistently. Growing up I never thought of any place we would visit or where we lived as a special place to me because I knew within a year or two we would be living somewhere new.
Packing up your whole life into brown cardboard moving boxes, getting into a moving truck that would always smell of cigarettes and sweat and going into a strange new house was fun for the first few moves; it felt like an adventure at first but year after year of the same routine it just started feeling normal to me. I used to think it was strange that my friends had never moved from their first house while I was going on to another house but as I grew up, I realized that it was strange to move as often as my family did. In total my family and I have moved from strange house to stranger house 12 times in my 19 years.
Although I have always lived in Arizona but that is 12 new houses, 12 years of being the new kid at a different school, 12 years of unpacking just to repack 11 months later, and starting the cycle all over again. I could never keep track of the all cities we lived in, or the number of schools I bounced around and back to but I could always remember how my room was set up in every single house. I did not have a choice as to which new city we lived in or moved back to, or what new school I was blindly tossed into but I did have choice as to how my room could look.
That was always my favorite part of moving, I knew no matter what I would be able to organize and decorate my room the way I wanted it to be. I used to think moving was kind of stressful to me because my family usually procrastinated until the day or two days before so my family would rush packing. We would go without sleeping for that day or those two days just packing everything and doing late night moving runs. But to me being able to have my own room and unpacking was always so calming to me. I also would buy candles quite often for my room because I hated the smell of the cardboard boxes and I always liked my rooms to smell the same.
To this day, I still burn the same rotation of candles which are a eucalyptus and spearmint, pumpkin or a fruit scent. I always burn a eucalyptus candle when I am studying for tests or when I am sick because eucalyptus and spearmint is a de-stressing agent and it always helps me focus more on my work. I always have pumpkin scents burning during the fall and winter months because fall has always been my favorite season and it is usually around the time my family finally gets completely settled into a new house.
Lastly I burn fruit scents during the summer months because we always move during summer and fruit scents always make my room smell fresh and clean so when I move out the next person to live in that room would not have to smell just cardboard boxes. My rooms used to have tons of decorations and I would keep a lot of items I had gotten from family and friends to try and make my room feel more like this is where we would stay for a while and not feel like we were just temporary visitors.
After a while I got tired of carrying extra boxes around because sometimes they would get lost or damaged during the move or my room would be smaller than the last room and I would not have any place for all the extra boxes that would end up just floating around my room. I hated being constantly reminded by the brown cardboard boxes that sooner than later they would consume my room and I would be leaving to once again a new house. But once I got into high school I started decorating my rooms less and less.
I decided to just keep a few things in my room. A bed, dresser, television, a gaming console, a desk, a chair and a few candles would be all I really needed. I started to like the view of having my room kind of empty. After a while I did not feel like I was trapped in a corner of my own room. I no longer had boxes overflowing from out of my closet filling my floors anymore. My room has always been a place I could go and know no matter what happens I would always have it, even though it was a new house I felt like it was always the same.
