Year One - The Room by Ellora Sutton

It was just a room.

To the podgy toddler with a sunshine soul and a mind like Eden, as she crawled and stood and stumbled and fell and rose and walked, the room was a treasure trove of first-times to explore.

To the two little girls having a tea party, sat cross-legged on the cream carpet, each with a coffin-eyed porcelain doll cradled in the meadow of her lap, the room was a fine little café in Neverland, populated by fairies and mermaids and nameless creatures painted on the canvas of their young minds by the brush of imagination, but always with flowing blonde hair and golden hearts pulsing with magic.

To the girl-woman with streetlights for eyes and a copper kettle heart, with a wallet full of dust and a mind overgrown with flowers, the room echoed cavernously with freedom and potential.

To the man wringing his hands anxiously as he watched the woman pace around the room like walking was a dance as complex as a rose, the warped floor chattering as her dainty steps made it creak, it was a ballroom, and he was a lowly pauper observing a princess in her own setting – the room was a mirror into what his life could be.

To the newlyweds with hands joined like the clasp of a diamond necklace and hearts a universe wide, the room was their favourite place in the childhood home gifted to them; it was a place waiting to be filled.

To the warm young couple painting small Picasso squares of delicate pink paint samples onto the play-dented and time-greyed walls – the man with a face like Indian sunshine and the woman with her dandelion hands gently crowning the swelling pearl of her stomach – the room was a dream pregnant with promise.

To the too-young widower, knelt clutching at the bars of an unused-cot, the room was a six-foot deep hole waiting to be filled with fistfuls of cold, black earth.

To the childless father and wifeless husband with granite eyes older than his face who, every night, would open the soft pine wardrobe and get out the corps de ballet of unworn baby girl dresses and tutus and hand-knitted jumpers, the room was a broken glass that cut his mouth every time it quenched his thirst.

To the old man looking out of the grimy little window, his view distorted by a constellation of mould just as his memory was distorted by time, with loneliness eating at his lungs like a cancer and heartbreak veining his memories, the room was a prison he was tied to by the shackles of a love lost, something too painful to hold on to but too precious to release.

To the house clearance worker with the arms of a gorilla and the face of a detective, his neck covered with a doodle of blurry tattoos, his back aching dully as he boxed up dusty photo albums and neglected jewellery and too-pristine baby clothes and other personal things that meant nothing to him, the room was just a room.