codenamewanderlust | LJIdol / LPF: Week 3: Tsundoku

It had been a pattern for awhile.
As soon as I would make a space exactly right I would suddenly have to move

Take it all down

Start over in some other place with the barest essentials usually

For years this would happen to me over and over

I would find just the right way to arrange the furniture for efficiency of space and energetic flow

Perhaps it’s a nomadic tendency held over from being born poor and having a complicated family history

I got used to living out of boxes

But I couldn't help making any new new living situation my own in some way

I've become sentimentally attached to furniture and cried over thrift store clothing finds I had to leave behind

I have one small steamer style trunk that has followed me somehow

From home to home

Even after a brief stint “on the road”

My friends passed it from closet to basement until I landed on my feet

Books were the hardest to lose

Adopted from curbside free bins
or bought at witchy boutique shops or sidewalk sales

Mémoires and travelogues mostly skimmed

Underlined and highlighted

Out of print novels with enticing covers vying for attention

Coffee table photography books of the strangest homes money could build

And abandoned railway stations

I’d take as many as I could carry when the time inevitably came to choose

I buried my favorites in the bottom of the trunk; read and unread unlike

I’d get somewhere new and begin making it home

Stack books on the floor until I was gifted a night stand by a new roommate

Or that time I found a sturdy wooden desk spray painted silver and purple left for the trash collectors that I carried three grueling blocks all by myself because I didn't have a car

I have two shelves now

That came with the small non-permitted diy back porch room in my grandmother’s home in Florida for I have returned like a boomerang for a third time
This time I got myself a job as a bookstore barista and have acquired more books to add to the ambiance of the room

I took all the books out of the steamer trunk and lined them up by genre, and size

I’ve got a stack of unread library books next to my bed though

Somewhere along the way I gifted myself a kindle paper-white - I treasure it,as a literary gormandizer and minimalist lover of efficiency to me it is magic

but I still can’t turn down a good cover, or the musty scent of old pages

Maybe I will put up more shelves

One of the shelves I can barley reach because the room wasn't originally built for me
I hope to afford just the right folding step stool that could double as a seat to maximize the space

I have put up art on the walls

Made curtains

I recently bought a minty colored folding table to use my gram’s shiny black Singer sewing machine from the 40’s that still stitches like a beast as I sit on the edge of the bed

I call the room the Rainbow Oasis
I am afraid to get it set up exactly right