I’m sitting on my bed, laptop settled across my folded legs. My back is against a pillow to cushion my spine from the wooden poles of the headboard.
I look to my right, out the window overlooking our small square of land within this neighborhood. The window is framed in thick, deep purple curtains. We bought the curtains to use in my room at the last house, because the traffic at night was so loud and all the headlights from the travelers on the highway shone right in. Once we moved, I decided to keep them, even though there aren’t any main roads crossing just in front of my bedroom window here. I like the color, and they block sound and light from outside when I’m trying to sleep.
Tilting my head back just a little, I see the cross I’ve hung above my window—I made it at a neighborhood VBS club our friends did one summer when I was much younger, in the little park that belonged to the apartment complex we lived in at the time. It’s just a simple, wooden cross, two flat pieces crossed over one another and glued in place, stained and finished to bring out the natural glow of the warm brown wood. I never really knew what to do with it in the past; it has no hanger or stand or any real way to be displayed. It has floated around our house for years, never with any real place or purpose. I never knew what to do with it, but I never wanted to get rid of it. Now I’m glad to finally have a place for it, over my window, one of the first things the eyes fall on when one walks into the door to my room. I can look up from where I sit on my bed to do my schoolwork and see it easily.
I’ve got music playing on the Echo device to my left. My dad let me borrow it from him several months ago when I didn’t have an alarm clock, and then shortly after bought himself a new, updated model, so I’ve kept this one. I don’t play music on it too often, but sometimes I just get in a mood to listen to things aloud, instead of in my headphones as usual. Today’s selection is loud, brash, dramatic classicl music—specifically, an album I found not too long ago entitled “The 35 Most Evils Pieces of Classical Music”. I’m not sure who considers these pieces “evil”. Many of them do seem dark or brooding or war-like, but none of them are truly scary, and many have gaps of soft, pleasant woodwind and strings between sections of the loud, triumphant, conquering brass.
The blanket I’m sitting on atop the bed needs to be straightened; it lies crooked across the bed and is rumpled and wadded beneath me. I’ve been sleeping under a lot of blankets recently; my dad likes to keep the house extremely cold at night, and if I don’t have at least two, and lately three, thick comforters, I can’t get to sleep. I guess it makes sense that he would want the house so cold to sleep in after spending most of the day in the blazing sun, working in the dirt and dust and grime his job seems to have no end of. I don’t blame him any for wanting to be comfortable, though it can be a little hard to drag my eyes open and force my legs to propel my body out of the bed some mornings when it’s so cold in my room. At least I have carpet in here; if the floors were wooden or even worse, tiled, I’m not sure I’d ever be able to force my feet to step down onto them after being wrapped so snugly beneath the covers.
The timer on my iPad goes off, and I reach out my left hand to stop it. Writing time is over; now it’s back to studying for my Math exam.
Nor bid the Stars farewell 