Walls

In the house where I grew up, the walls of my bedroom were sticky. Not sticky enough to trap bugs, but sticky enough to keep dust and hairs. Sticky enough to pull a little on my fingers when I touched it.

The wallpaper was old and yellowing, a dusty pink and green floral pattern crossed with beige pinstripes. The wall glue had saturated the paper. Sometimes when I lay in bed in the summer, with lazy late-day orange sunlight filtering in through the gauzy white curtains, I'd reach out and stick my fingers and palm to the wall. Stick, peel, stick, peel, stick, peel, just sleepily feeling the soft tug as my skin parted from the paper. I'd turn onto my side and study the repeating patterns, turn this rosebud and that leaf into a happy face with crazy spaceman hair. Even back then I needed to wear glasses, so the flowers on the walls were blurred and vague, edges fuzzy and gentle like my stuffed animals.

The paper had a smell. Not a musty, coiling, basements-and-attics smell. Not a chemical smell, either. It was old, and comfortable, and a little bit dusty and fragile, like an old book you've read so much it has soup stains and wiggly water-warped pages and the dolphin bookmark you bought from the book-order in fourth grade still stuck in it. It was the smell of my bed and home.

At friends' houses, I'd run my hands lightly across walls that weren't sticky. They felt smooth and cool and indifferent. They didn't care if you touched them, didn't help keep a grip when you put out a hand to steady yourself. They were crisp and pretty and clean, so all you could do was smudge them up.

We moved out of that house when I was eleven. I heard the new owners pulled down the old sticky paper and painted the room a fashionable icy blue and put a saltwater fish tank in there, and now it's a home office.