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Keelan Joseph Machado

My disorganized room served a larger purpose than it seemed. Living there since I divorced myself from my sister’s room next door at eight years old, it had become the place where I realized, looking in my hand-me-down mirror, that I was growing and changing every day. All my emotions have been poured into those four walls. I cried into my pillow, laughed to have the walls echo back my happiness, and broken a handful of very important memories in fits of animalistic rage, while later realizing that, “hey, this just kind of happens sometimes.”

In the first week of February in 2021, my room functioned as a waiting room. Nobody likes waiting rooms. The only excusable waiting room is before entering Velocicoaster in Islands of Adventure, but even that’s a line. I had auditioned for the final stage play that our school would be producing that year, Arthur Miller’s The Crucible: My final chance to apply nine years of theater experience on a stage. My audition for the lead as John Proctor was good at first, but then stumbled into seeming like a traumatized lunatic, and my auditions for both the Reverends were okay. I crossed and uncrossed my toes for days in my room, isolated from reality, mulling over my audition process and whether or not I should text the instructor for another chance or for a way to do it better. Then came what seemed to be the hottest and most suffocating February 9th of my life, and the cast list was out.

I got in.

My self-consciousness was in my head, I suppose, because although I didn’t have the honor of playing John Proctor, I was chosen to play Reverend Parris. Me, my four walls, and my ceiling sighed a collective sigh of relief as I felt my internal insecurities applauded away by victory and pride. I ran to tell my family, not confident about my abilities to portray such a character, but overjoyed at the prospects of doing so. I came back to my room and flopped onto my mattress, again a comfortable recluse. Then the cast received another message: “Print scripts for rehearsal tomorrow after school.” My piles of messy clothing parted like the red sea for me to change and go bug my dad to take me to Office Depot. My printer broke down years ago, and instead of repairing it, we settled with taking a short trip to Office Depot with a USB. Though it was very late, I was eventually able to pull my dad up and to the car, and we were off.

Once again, I was shrouded in anticipation. This time was different, however, as I understood that I was no longer stuffed into the pocket of possible failure, but had passed the line of victory. On the way there, I thought about how relieved my action figures, LEGO models, and instruments must have felt that they wouldn’t have to be my emotional support for at least another few months. After getting my script printed, the hot paper my trophy, I got a phone call from my sister, the only one in the house. She had just woken up from a nap and drowsily said:

“Keelan. I think your guitar fell or something. It woke me up.”

“Can you go see what it is?”

“Yeah.”

…

“There’s a hole in your roof.”

We rushed back home immediately. I told my dad and he had a worried look on his face, because he knew that the roof for his room had almost fully collapsed a few years ago due to moisture build-up in the insulation. Entering the house, I tossed my script aside and sped to my room where my dad had been standing, open mouthed, staring into my room.

It was a cataclysm beyond what we could have imagined. Two-thirds of my roof had collapsed straight down and onto everything in my room. The underestimation of the damage done with my sister saying there was a hole in my roof is baffling. There was pounds upon pounds of insulation horribly littered everywhere. All my memories, creations, and items that I own were buried deep. A sudden feeling of disassociation from the situation was beginning to wash over me as I grasped the gravity of the situation. How was I going to sleep? How long would this take to fix? What have I lost? What do I do from here? Before I could fully lose myself in the rabbithole of everything that I have lost, my dad pulled me out by beginning to pick up. There wasn’t time to worry about suffering, there was only time to act. My whole family put on gloves and masks and started stuffing heaps of insulation into black garbage bags. We salvaged whatever memories and clothing that we could into boxes. We collected over a dozen full garbage bags of insulation. My room was fully emptied. I had never seen my room as a blank canvas. I felt as though now, I had time to mourn a little bit.
In the next months, I would be sleeping in a different room while our family reconstructed my ceiling. Sometimes, I slept on the couch in the living room, which made my back more crooked than it already was. After suffering from so much pain that I had trouble standing and walking, we decided to migrate my bedframe and mattress into an extra room in the house, packed with all the electronics, board games, and miscellaneous items of the house. My bedroom had assimilated with the messy room. I had been slowly adjusting to feeling like a nomad, but it never fully stuck with me. I searched for a way to make a totally empty room into something greater. In this time, I was able to make my room a private office and studio, recording videos for YouTube and playing Dungeons and Dragons with my friends. I was able to create something in what was supposed to be nothing. I was able to bounce back off of those four walls that have always had my back. Although it was officially the lowest point of my life thus far, I realized that as long as I can create something, anything, I can feel the same warmth in my heart as I feel when I’m at home in my bedroom.