PORTABLE HOME(S) - a snippet from the past

I was woken up by the sun this morning. It is the best alarm I will ever have. A large window allows it to illuminate my room at daybreak. I started my essay with this romantic daybreak  to show that the way I feel my room from the very beginning of the day is connected to its physical characteristics (bed beside a large window), geographical position (east), its phyisical setting (fourth floor of a building, Cvjetno Naselje block), which would be unimportant if it wasn’t for the general feeling of security, the familiar odors that surround me from the very morning. My personal place is a mixture of all of these factors and an additional extra element of unidentified, untouchable atmosphere that is felt in everyday life.

            At the beginning of the year, the dormroom is paradigmatically white, clean, and emptied out. I have to leave the room at the end of each year. I take off everything from the walls, from the pinboard, from the closets. I have to wipe off every spot and mark of myself, empty it out for some other person. I have to pack a year of my life into a couple of suitcases, move out, and move on. I have changed six dormrooms in my student life and all of them were temporary homes in the deepest meaning of the word as “an environment offering security and happiness“

            In the twelve square meters there are only two tables, two beds, two wardrobes, and one window. This place does not impose on me with its own charcteristics but longs and asks of me to create its identity side by side with my identity. I consider every new room a new question to me: blank, open, and direct: How have you changed? The answer to this question is given by my reorganization of the items in the room (the position of beds, table, lamp, shelf), covering the empty walls, the pinboard, the table with snippets of my daily life, signs of that  and previous year; theatre tickets, little post-it notes, photos from recent travels, badges, „philosophical“ quotes by my roommate and me, books etc. Each room carries memories of previous years, but I leave empty space for the accumulation of new things from my new life. So, the room is continuously created as a balance between the person I have been and the person I am becoming. It is a place that forces me to move on, to rethink my former life (literally in form of a dorm-year). Every time I enter a new dormroom, the question of what has happened to me and what has changed, what stayed the same (and should be changed) arises. It's a place that asks me every year to think of the change that happened in between the period. It seems to me a very dynamic way to think about personality change, and it shows the importance of physical restructuring. As we know, years can pass before one decides to rearrange or restructure their house or apartment, never getting this phyisical enforcement to think about one’s environment in connection to oneself.           

            Throughout the years my rooms changed geometrical shape (square and rectangle), the window changed size, the room looked in almost all directions: south,  north, and east (twice!), the floors varied from the first to the second to the fourth. Even the concept of the dorm room as a private place changed throughout the years; on the first year it was a common room of all possible known and unknown people, a kind of public place. Second year moved in a more personal direction accepting only selected group of people, while the third, fourth, and fifth moved towards a more individual perception of dorm room as my own place.  Finally, all of these people, sizes, directions, and positions are stored as invisible inventory within my new room, my last dorm room.

            It may seem like a paradox to choose a doormroom as a personal space especially due to the fact that dormrooms are supposed to be the essence of shared living. In one way it is true, it is my own place but it is also a place shared with my roommate. I don't see this joint living as an attack on my personal place. The barriers between my roommate and me are permeable and together we participate in the creation of the whole room, while retaining our own sense of place. There is a permeable membrane between us and one influences the other's creation of her own place. If the whole room was my own place, would it be the same? Would I like it in the same way I do now?

            While the dorm room is a place that awaits for me ready to take in all of what I have to offer,  it also obliges me to move and leave it as empty as I had found it. It creates a feeling of homelessness in the sense of never settling down for real, surrounded by portable things that can be packed in a suitcase, no permanent investments such as furniture, chair, kitchen utensils, and others. The feeling of limited homeliness conditions me: it never allows me to get rooted in a place but to carry it with me. This portability of home also implies constant and rapid change of personality in these formative years of my life, the unwillingness to be rooted, to create a permanent home.