Your Bedroom Walls Told People Who You Were

You probably didn’t have Zack Morris’s fridge. But you might have had his beanbag chair and TV. Your stereo took up most of the dresser, Michael Jordan hung above it, and an enormous boyfriend pillow left you a technical amount of room to sleep.

Your parents picked what went in the rest of the house. In here, you were making some decisions.

The dresser might be part of the bedroom set they bought when you were little. You couldn’t do much about that. But you could cover the mirror with pictures, move the speakers and hang something above it that didn’t involve the alphabet.

When a friend came over, you took them upstairs. They checked out the posters while you cleared enough clothes off the beanbag for them to sit down. You took the bed. It was your room.

A Poster Didn’t Need to Match Anything

Michael Jordan could hang beside a cherry-red Ferrari. Jordan was flying. The Ferrari was cool. That covered it.

Maybe they came from the school book fair, rolled up and carried back to class while somebody else bought a book about sedimentary rocks. Other posters came from the mall, where you flipped through a rack of hinged frames, each one clacking against the next.

You found the one you wanted, checked its little number and crouched down to look for the matching roll. Somebody behind you started flipping through the rack before you finished.

Nirvana. TLC. Cindy Crawford in a swimsuit. You could make room.

There were magazine pages too. Someone from Seventeen or Tiger Beat could hang beside a notebook sheet of cheat codes copied out of Game Informer. The codes stayed up long after you memorized them. Taking them down seemed like asking to forget the L1, R2 sequence right when you needed more weapons.

You unrolled the big posters on the floor and put books on the corners. Hanging one meant holding it against the wall with your forearm while trying to separate a piece of Scotch tape from the dispenser.

Eventually, it stayed up with tape or putty or both. You lay back on the bed to admire it. Cindy Crawford was slightly crooked, but fixing that meant getting up.

The Stereo Needed Most of the Dresser

Two cassette decks. A three-disc changer. Separate speakers. A volume knob big enough to suggest that turning it deserved some care.

The little bars on the display jumped with the music. You didn’t need to know what they measured to appreciate having them.

You pushed the speakers toward opposite ends of the dresser. One could go on a shelf if you stretched the cord across the closet door. Getting dressed would become more complicated, but the sound might improve.

The extra bass button made the dresser handles rattle. You tested it with “No Diggity” or “Semi-Charmed Life” and waited for the good part.

CDs stacked up beside it. Dookie, Jagged Little Pill, a jewel case with a broken hinge that came apart whenever you opened it. The little booklet slid out and landed between the dresser and the wall. You’d get that later.

The cases were more of a suggestion by then. You wanted to listen to “Wannabe,” but Spice was in a Soundgarden case. “Black Hole Sun” could wait.

Once the right disc was in, you could lie back down. The three-disc changer would handle the next couple of albums, assuming you remembered what else was in there.

The Bulletin Board Was Running Out of Room

School pictures went up first. Your friends signed the backs in gel pen, squeezing a message onto a wallet-size photograph as though they were never going to see you again. You would see them in science class after lunch.

Photo-booth strips from the mall hung beside them. Four attempts to get everybody into the frame, with somebody laughing in the only one where all the faces fit.

A concert ticket got a thumbtack through its corner. A friendship bracelet hung from another. The field-day ribbon stayed, although it was getting harder to see behind the newer stuff.

A note folded into a triangle stayed tucked behind a school picture. It said who liked who, which was still worth keeping even though everyone involved liked somebody else by now.

There was always room for another picture if you overlapped two others. Finding somewhere for it took longer when a friend was there. They wanted to know why someone else’s picture was bigger than theirs.

The Bed Was Also Furniture

Your friend sank into the beanbag while you leaned against the boyfriend pillow, flipping through the BMG catalog and arguing about which CDs to order. The lava lamp was going, although the overhead light ruined most of the effect.

The television sat close enough to watch from either spot. You could leave MTV on while looking through the catalog, then put it down when a video you liked came on. Your friend knew where the remote was. They spent enough time here.

Getting comfortable didn’t require much. The boyfriend pillow, something to drink and permission to keep the door closed would do it. You could talk for an hour without moving anything except the catalog and whichever leg was falling asleep.

When the lights went out, the glow-in-the-dark stars your dad stuck up years earlier were still there. The ABCs your mom stenciled on the wall disappeared under paint. The stars stayed. You were old enough to hang a swimsuit poster, but you still slept under the same ceiling as your race-car bed.

Peeling them off meant finding a chair and dealing with whatever they left behind. You could live with them a little longer.

Kids Still Make Their Rooms Their Own

Band posters still arrive rolled up, although the tube can come to the porch instead of riding home from the mall. Online shops make it easier to find a particular singer, album cover or movie. Pinterest supplies enough bedroom ideas to make moving the furniture seem reasonable again.

The equipment takes up less space. A small speaker can sit beside a lamp without requiring you to relocate half the dresser. A phone handles things that once needed their own shelves.

But choosing a poster still means deciding you want to see it every day. A saved picture needs a place on the wall. A concert ticket can still be worth keeping after the show ends.

Nothing Stayed in the Same Place Forever

Sometimes you spent a Saturday moving everything.

Halfway through, the dresser blocked the door and you needed to unplug the stereo to get the bed past it. You kept going. Putting everything back would be admitting the old arrangement was better.

By late afternoon, you stood in the doorway to inspect the room. You went downstairs and came back up, just to enter it properly.

Other changes happened a piece at a time. A magazine face came down. A new poster needed the space. The concert ticket stayed pinned to the board long after you took down the band’s poster.

Pulling off the tape exposed little patches of missing paint. Blue putty left marks you rubbed with your thumb until you decided the next poster could cover them.

You stood back to check whether it was straight. Someone downstairs called you for dinner.

You left the stereo on.