Days of Room 812

Last month and for the first time after many years I revisited the university hostel in which I lived for 2 years when I was a student. The main tree-lined street brought back vivid memories. Everything looked the same as I last laid my eyes on, except a new metro line that was recently constructed in the middle of the street.

Inside the hostel I had the same feeling I used to have whenever I visited my parents’ house after long absence. Everything looked significantly smaller than what was left of it in my memory. At my parents’ house I asked myself why my room looked smaller, the hallway dimmer, the living room less spacious? And in the hostel I also felt that roads between dormitories became narrower, buildings shorter and the green areas more limited.

I never understood why my mind keeps a bigger/brighter-than-reality visual memory of places.

This is different from the visual perception we preserved from childhood of the sizes of objects. When I was a child my parents’ closet looked huge, and my sister and I could easily hide in it. Their king size bed stood like a playground where we rolled over from one edge to another. But as our bodies grew bigger, the closet and the bed grew smaller.

In my visit to the hostel, all memories came up. My tiny but back-then freshly renovated room on the eighth floor, my circle of friends, the up and down states of mood, and the different languages and faces around. Ah… I still can also recall a pale picture of a skinny shy person who once resembled me.