A Personal Essay By Bogdan Stilmashenko
For Prof. Tracie Gemmel’s course entitled Rhetorical Strategies

      When all was said and done, the new room still looked empty; a bed and a bookshelf did little against the callousness of the white old walls. And never did I manage to soften the space; make it more appealing. This room must have wished to be a prison cell.

     This two-month trial of living in the city hadn’t been planned as an adventure, and all-in-all it really wasn’t. I’d wake up early, work and sometimes go to the gym. In the evenings, I wouldn’t usually call numbers saved in my phone, but they didn’t care to act offended. They didn’t act at all, and neither did I, although I did yearn. When I didn’t go out, which was most of the time, I would wash dishes, do laundry, make food or work on other ridiculous chores. If those were done, I’d read. Such were my routine exercises during the months of July and August.

     Of course, every still moment has its buzzing fly, and as such, I had to bear my roommate’s presence. My situation with him was interesting: By the time I’d moved in, he’d begun to dislike me, and I didn’t care for him either. We feigned interest, but in reality would avoid one another’s business. As such, a polite tension always hovered about the air.  He was, overall, an agreeable person, and during the previous winter had mentioned needing someone to pay half his rent in the summer. I volunteered, for at the time I thought it would be a good idea and a fun experience. 

     An experience, it sure was: Boredom, a consistent ennui, night after night. Without the internet, without any sort of outside stimulation, I, a shameless extrovert, was condemned to myself.

     At first, I’d just drink a lot. Although I did try to take walks, doing a minimum (a drunk minimum because clarity was irritating and I wanted nothing to do with it, nothing at all) of participation in the world, but I kept getting pulled back into that awfully cold (only aesthetically since we had no A.C.) excuse of a room. Then drinking became dull as well. I’d just sit in that 4×2 meter space and wait for something to happen, on the verge of implosion. The walls would stare at me, blankly, without judgment, and I’d return their gaze. I no longer thought or acted; I merely was. With time, this evolved, rather pleasantly, into a sort of meditation, and I’d welcome these silent evenings, with their rich nothingness. The less they spoke, the more the white surfaces told me about myself through the reflection of the mind’s abyss. All my past prides, passions, ideals, abstractions, concrete achievements, when brought before the mighty court of the Bed and Bookshelf, were ground down, turned into dust, eradicated, by the sheer indifference of its audience: These cold, solemn, transcendent walls. I had unwillingly reduced myself to an empty shell, a hollow set of fragile bones, a man-baby.

     From there, I could only start anew, completely. The daily routine had become a challenge: I would force myself to rigorously follow its pattern, exercise my body by the sheer physical exertion of a full-time job and an evening workout. I did as the monks do when, armed with their filthy old rags and half a bucket of water, they clean their floors until their muscles are sore for months before beginning any other kind of training. The more I immersed myself in repetition, the less I was my old, indolent, childish self. My room was no longer a prison, nor a court: Instead, the chamber had slowly shaped itself into a minimal temple, my monochrome retreat.

     And through this silent litany, I began to come of age. I felt liberated from the world around me, and comfortable in my solitude. Eventually, I found myself company, as it were, through immersion in literature. Authors of American modern classics I hadn’t met in public school were now all greeting me enthusiastically, cutting open a pocket into my mind, and storing in its void their share of wisdom. Tome after tome, sages’ vivid imagery and articulacy stuffed my pockets, like a thief’s at a convenience store. I now felt reborn as a whirlwind of thought, a pillar of knowledge, a man to end all men.

     But then, as I shifted my eyes beyond inked pages, the walls were still there: The same indelicate inertia, the same great rigidity of matter. While I got excited over symbols written by men such as I, the same men who, continuing the cycle of education, also labored over the same syllables, underlying meanings, struggled to find the ethos and whatever other abstractions, working themselves to death, shaky, anxious, shouting “who am I??”, always insecure, never complete, the walls stood. Fixed and firm. And stand they will, whether or not these walls, but other walls, similar walls, different walls,  lifted all walls sure enough of their existence and will to exist not to have to ask vapid questions about themselves and other things, sure enough to stay solid and resolute. Surprisingly, I’d found humility and self-discipline not in others, or in books, but in these wretched, freshly-painted pieces of cardboard.

     When September had come, and I had tucked away my boxes in my parent’s car to be driven to my home in the suburbs, I ran back inside to pick up something I’d forgotten. As I looked into the room one last time, I was relieved to see that it, just as before, could not care less whether or not I was there. It would continue on without me quite well. I thought of Jerusalem, and it’s supposedly sacred set of bricks that Jews kiss and press their heads against. It was a funny idea, so I smiled.