I did not replace my bed sheets even as they wore thinner and thinner. I grew larger inside of the same twin-sized bed, but even as the space decreased I saw it as a growing openness, an increasing availability to be kissed by a gust of wind that blew through my window any night. 

Sometimes I woke up cold. With each shiver I entertained the thought of sealing my room shut, of trying to be satisfied by the blanket which covered me and the complacent air which bounced off the four walls, but overpowering these thoughts I heard it pulsing in my brain like a chant: “untouched, un-, Untouched, un-”.

After opening the window, it was not long before reality began to morph into something that I could at least pretend mirrored my imagination. I felt smug, knowing that by opening the window, I had become the first mover in initiating the change which overturned my world.

“Why do you want to change the wallpaper?” my mom asked me, when I was fifteen years old and decided that the interior design of my room was no longer acceptable. Naturally, this meant the puppies had to be sacrificed as well, all for the grand purpose of pink and red walls. 

I did not tell her that something about the nature of the wallpaper had changed, because I knew that I had opened the window, thus I knew that its transformation was my fault. The puppies had not seen it happen to me, but one night I had come back into my room differently than I had left it, and the same eyes which I had once yearned to look at me would not take their eyes off of me. They stared as if I had become some sort of a spectacle, some sort of obscenity. I was no longer something they did not notice, I was now something they rejected. Somewhere in their world outside the frame of the wallpaper, an image of my face was pinned up to a tree, alerting all the dogs that I was prohibited from entering into their world of meadows and buttercups. 

The night that everything changed, I came home to sleep in the bed for which I was too big. For the first time in a long time, I closed the window. All night it remained closed even as the wind thrashed against it, fighting to make its way into my room, fighting to graze my skin in the way for which I had once begged. The ceiling fan above me threw air down at me as if a punishment, and the facade of indifference which I had spent years crafting was beginning to crack. I do not know how much of me was inside of my body, but I know that all of me was fully inside of each leftover-mascara-smudging teardrop which escaped from behind the confines of my eyes and stained my face. I was trying to be smaller under my blanket, trying to wish the fabric into something thicker, something that could cloak me, something that could construct a barrier between myself and the world. I collected the overwashed, discolored comforter material into my fists and pressed it against each of my ears, listening. They say that when you do this with seashells, you can hear the ocean. They don’t tell you that, really, all you can hear is your own blood circulating through your own brain. “I’ll see you through the loneliness of wanting more, more, more”.

When I finally found sleep that night, I had one of those rare dreams in which you see yourself out of body, in which you watch yourself like a character. I saw myself at age eight, staying home from school sick one day and staring out the window as yellow school buses rolled by - wishing I lived further away from school to necessitate riding one instead of walking. I saw myself at age twelve, using the carpet of my room as a stage and my hairbrush as a microphone, twirling around and thinking that one day life would impress itself upon me the way I wanted and I’d be shaped into a woman. My dreams that night became the first time I saw myself, which is to say my mind was exposed to my body and the result was a long-awaited unification. As much as this felt like a completion, I knew then that I had been touched by the world before I had been seen by myself. According to what I had heard about women, this was not something that could be taken back.

That was the morning I woke up and decided with conviction that the wallpaper needed to go. That was the morning I woke up with an unretouched image of myself embossed into my brain like a poster and the lyric repeating in my head, starting and finishing over and over and over again like a heartbeat, “see you, breathe you, want to be you”.

On the topic of the wallpaper, I responded to my mom, “I think I’ve just outgrown it”, which meant: “I used to want it to look at me, and now it won’t stop, and I want to go back to a time when I was too small to be seen.”

“We can go look at paints tomorrow, then,” she offered, “but the wallpaper is just so adorable. We have to take it off very carefully so I can put some of it in a frame.”

The framed square of wallpaper now rests on a shelf in my childhood bedroom, appearing to me the most vibrant thing in the room every time I go home. I have learned to gauge the image of myself off of sensations more qualitative than the level to which I’ve been touched. But still, I think of how I used to blend in with the grass and the dandelions so completely that the puppies didn’t even notice me, I think of how I used to be before I became a display for indulgence, and the lyric rises from dormancy in my head like a throb, “it’s not enough to say that I miss you”.