I got into a fight with my mom this past weekend and ran downstairs into the unfinished basement where a random bed was placed. It was put there for when my sister and I would come home for the weekend and needed a place to sleep. As I layed in the darkness, revering in my anger, I wished I could disappear under the layer of blankets, or to some little nook in my parents house where I could hide and not come out until my mom begged me to tell me where I was because she was so sorry that she was mean to me. It was in this moment that I remembered that I once had a place that had saved me so many times from unwanted interactions such as this.
The bedroom that I acquired at the age of three when my family moved into a bigger house was great. The house, and my bedroom, was halfway in the ground, which made it very cold in the winter. If you looked out the windows of my bedroom, you would be eye level with the ground. This came in handy when I wanted to sneak out to meet boys or quick run two houses down to my best friends house for a quick word.
The greatest thing though about this room was it’s closet. It wasn’t particularly big, but the unique thing about it was that it had a 3×4 hole in the corner that lead to the hallway closet. If you stood in the hallway outside my room, you could simply open the closet door, crawl through 7 feet or so, on a curve, under the stairs, and end up in my closet. For the first portion of my life in this house I kept the hole boarded up because I was terrified of my closet and the unknown creatures that could sneak into my room while I slept.
So I kept it boarded up until 7th grade or so when my friend kim and I decided to make it our personal fort. We listened to music down there, and prank called boys we liked. My older sister and I used to tell jokes to each other until my mom would come stomping down the stairs and yell at us to go to bed.
My father never had that much patience for my sisters and I, and we were used to the mental (and sometimes physical) bruising he layed upon us. Many times I was thankful that when I went to go run from my dad I had my closet to hide in. Something would happen, and I would run downstairs to my bedroom. My mom or dad (whoever I got in a fight with) would come down moments later, only to find that I had disappeared off the face of the earth. The closet door in my bedroom would be wide open, and sometimes I could hear them searching in my closet for me, only to come up empty. I planned it out where I would put long dresses and such on hangers right where the hole was, so the hole would be covered up. I think after a while they forgot about the hole in my closet since I stopped talking about it because I used it as a refuge space.
The hole wasn’t always a good thing, I soon found out. There was an instance once where I was hanging out in my room, reading Seventeen magazine and singing to myself. Suddenly I heard laughing, from the direction of my closet, and found my two friends from the neighborhood spying on me. Someone had let them into the house and so they crawled into the hallway closet and watched me from the opening in my closet. I remember feeling very vulnerable after I discovered what they had done.
A year or so after I moved out of this house, my parents moved into a new house to retire in. One with no crawl spaces for their 26 year old daughter to retreat to when she got in a fight with her parents.
I’ve always been intrigued about each house’s story. Who lived there, what memories were made there, etcetera . Every once in a while I’ll pass the house I grew up in and see the young family playing in the front yard. I wonder if they ever are curious about the little things that went on in the house and what adventures the closet inspired for people before them.
