Time goes on and the days of complete darkness start to lighten in my memory. “Hey it wasn’t so bad, the past years..the past childhood,” I start to say. I remember my white space though. It was a dingy stairway inside the Hotel By The Bar where I went to escape. There was so much pain there I remember. I liked it there. I felt somehow both afraid and hopeful. I wanted to be in that stairway in the back of the hotel because I partly believed that someone was going to come and snatch me and the other part made me feel like I was somehow alone there and I couldn’t be found.

There was a door to the second level of the hotel at the top and a door to the bottom level on the bottom. The hotel wasn’t very big or clean. It didn’t attract people from the upper or middle classes. It was a place where drunk lovers would swoop in for the night to share a secret affair. It was a place where a truck driver would duck out for an evening to get a shower in. It was a place of drama and bed bugs and fighting. Inside that stairway, the walls were white. The carpet was green, but I never looked at that, only the white walls. It was nice I thought. To be there.

I would come after school and sit there with my backpack staring into the perfect whiteness. I thought of my fears, failures, and future. My fears were sheltered there because the white walls reminded me to keep everything in perspective. White has no clutter, no distractions. It doesn’t try to overwhelm or manipulate or hypnotize. It is honest. It does not lie. It was sheltering because I knew what to expect from it... always white, always clean, always pure.

My head relaxed against my backpack as a pillow and I would stare into the ceiling. No worries. Homework sinking. Myself floating. It was all going to be okay. We were going to get out of here. There is always hope. I sat there and I reminded myself of my goals. I reminded myself of all that I could be if I could only not give up, but damn it, I wanted at times to taste peace. I never wanted to “quit” because I knew that quitting would bring a greater desire and urge to challenge myself but I did want sleep.

I wanted peace. I wanted to close my own door to my own room and at times I felt so selfish for wanting that. “I don’t deserve it,” I would remind myself. I remember calling my Mimi and having her remind me that “you got toughness in your bones girl, you don’t know how to quit and you won’t." Those words ran through my head in my white place. Tears came there too. They felt safe here, yes someone could walk through either upper or lower doors but at least I would have time to wipe the tears before anyone saw. No locks to any doors. When I felt like running away from everything, but I compromised with this place. I compromised with my white place.