Day 8: A Song I Know All the Words To

This will be a kind of two-for-one, because this was the the song I had planned to use for my day 7. I forgot about it, of course, until several hours after I posted about "Crazy Train" instead. So here's a song that I know all the words to, but that also reminds me of a certain forbidden spring.

Freshman year, second semester. My roommate never went to bed before 2 or 3 in the morning. She stayed up watching television shows on her laptop without ever turning the light out. I had wanted to switch rooms after winter break, but I was too lazy to move all my stuff out and didn't know where I'd move to anyway, or who I'd room with. Then, just before spring break I heard about the empty room right next door. It sounded perfect. I could have a room all to myself, and I would still have to move my things out of the current room, but they wouldn't be going very far. I talked to my RA and she promised to talk to the RE for me. It looked very much like I would be getting that room.

Days passed. I spoke to my RA again, and she said one of the girls had never signed out of the room, though she was clearly living at home and had not been back to the dorms for quite some time. The room was abandoned, but not officially available. Spring break came and went, and I told myself it wouldn't be worth it now. Why move into another room for only a few weeks, even if it was just next door? I told myself to give up on the idea. But I couldn't.

One day I found out the empty room was unlocked. I moved some bedsheets and a pillow into the room in secret and began to sneak in every night to get to sleep at a decent hour, always remembering to wake up and sneak back to my own room at four or five so my roommate would only think I had been out late. Through a series of events that would take too much time to explain, the room became locked and I borrowed the key secretly so I could take my sheets back and give up my routine. Again, I could not. I kept the key and continued sneaking into the room until someone caught on and my RA confronted me.

I somehow discovered this song around that time, and now when I hear it I can almost feel that fleeting sense of freedom, the thrill of my secret, empty room. I called it my Room of Refuge.

"Paper Walls" by Yellowcard

Empty rooms tend to echo like crazy, so I would listen to music to shut out the noises from the hall. Most nights I just listened to this CD, and the title track was by far my favorite. It's a beautiful tale about breaking free from all the nonsense and getting back to the music, the reason the band started playing in the first place.

I loved that, but it meant something even more to me, I think. "Let's burn a hole so we can climb out of these paper walls and this empty house." I listened to this song during a time of escape, and I think my own dorm room felt more empty than my precious Room of Refuge. The Room of Refuge was the hole I had burned to get out. And I think that's why this song really stuck with me, and why I still know the lyrics to this day.