Another of Stefi’s Many Talents

When Ben got home a short while ago, he paused while taking his shoes off.  He had only to catch a glimpse of the piles of miscellaneous items leading through the doorway to our bedroom.  “I’d better just leave again right now,” he said, laughing.

 

Ben knows a certain little fun fact about me.  I love to rearrange my furniture.

 

Maybe it’s an obsessive-compulsive thing.  I often feel my bedroom becoming stagnant, everything piling up and becoming cluttered.  The room makes me feel tired and weighted down.   It’s therapeutic to thoroughly clean everything, and for some reason, to move things around too.  I’m always optimistic, confident that the new arrangement will somehow stimulate creativity and peace of mind. I don’t really believe in feng shui, but I suppose that what I’m doing is just a less literal version.

 

I’ve been doing this since I was a kid. I could occasionally convince my mom to let me rearrange, and she would help me move my bed to the other side of the room and put my CD player here and my TV there. But we moved when I was eleven, and my new room didn’t really allow me to do this. In fact, I suffered through seven years of mostly-stagnant furniture, only moving a bookshelf back-and-forth once in a while. The problem was that with my TV having to connect to the wall in a particular spot, and with the positions of my closet and all of my windows, my bed and desk could only fit in certain spots. It drove me crazy, but there wasn’t much I could do about it.

 

Fortunately, I eventually went off to college and moved into a dorm where I was lucky to have my own room. Now, this room was about the size of a walk-in closet, but at least it was all mine. It came with a desk, a chair, and a huge, heavy bed with big drawers underneath. The bed was only a few inches shorter than the smallest wall in the room, so you can probably imagine how difficult it was going to be for me to move it around.  At least a few times throughout the year, I would turn things around, trying to find the perfect configuration. My roommates were always amazed that I could do it.  It was like a puzzle for me. I would have to move the desk over here to move the bed, then move the desk back to pull the bed the other way. I’d be down on the floor, pushing the heavy bed with all the strength in my body, then climbing over things to go push it from the other side. Not once did I ask anyone to help me move my stuff. Naturally, I would be pretty proud of myself once the job was finished.

 

So when Ben was gone this afternoon, I decided that it would be the perfect time to move everything in our bedroom. This meant the bed, the huge bookshelf, both our desks, our worktable, and both nightstands. I wasn’t sure if I’d be able to move some of it by myself, much less shuffle it all in a crowded room, but it proved to be much easier than my old dorm room. By the time Ben got home, I was finished with the furniture and was trying to put away as much of our junk as I could. After he jokingly threatened to leave, I pulled him into the room to show him what I’d done. I felt bad that I didn’t ask him before moving his desk, but he seemed to love the new arrangement. I showed him the open space the configuration had created, and in the spirit of “Stepbrothers”, said, “It’ll give us so much extra space in our room to do activities!”  As though I still needed room to stretch out on the rug to color or do crafts.  Some of us never really grow up.