Once when I was a young girl my mother punished me by sending me up to "my" room for hours and hours, in solitary. It wasn't really my room. I never had my own room in that house. Not one of us did, there, ever - not my brothers, or my sister. Even my parents didn't have their own space. My father's room was the living room, and by extension after a certain hour in the evening the entire downstairs became his undefileable domain. He slept on the sofa, and for a time my mother's room was the adjoining 'verandah' (seventies-weird-fake-wood paneled, inadequately winterized sunporch), on the other side of whose sheer-curtained French doors from the living room, wedged in a corner, was a narrow divan.

I don't recall how old I was the afternoon my mother exiled me to the pumpkin-colored upstairs bedroom. The wall color had been my idea, some years past. Inspired by an enticing photo spread from the likes of Seventeen (read when I was - say, nine) I had clamored for an orange room with a wood latticed wall on which I could - could what? don't recall now - pin stuff? Anyway, the lattice I'm sure might have mitigated the strong, palpitation-inducing orange. Why on earth - besides my champion nagging - did my mother ever consent to letting my younger brothers (a) paint the room (read, splotches, rough patching, etc.), (b) let alone in such a loud unforgiving shade? I don't remember the original wall color, perhaps it had been a fusty, decades-old wallpaper of the previous homeowners. But the orange paint remained for years, a complete fingers-on-the-blackboard attack on the psyche in a room in a very cramped house, a room in which one wished perhaps to retire for some peace, some privacy, some soothing quiet. I shared that room for a long time with my mother and my sister, three twin beds at odd angles positioned around the room. (So, so hard, silent fumbling executions in the night of an utterly passionate heart.) Years earlier, my sister's crib had been against one of the walls.

Anyway, I just remember my mother punishing me - who knows my transgression - by sending me up to solitary. And I thought I would go mad, for that one afternoon. I mean, we were already in solitary enough, did I need to be in solitary more? That was the cruel joke of it, we were always stuck in that house together somehow, with nowhere to go. For a long time my mother couldn't, didn't drive, refused, it seemed, to get lessons. So we really were stuck there. Couldn't even go to the supermarket without it involving a long walk. I knew all the shortcuts, going up the steps to the church on the hill, crossing the lot, going back down the hill on the other side.

I thought I would go mad when as a girl she ordered me to the room, closed the door, no contact. And I was very angry about it. Eventually there was some sort of glasnost, for some reason I'm thinking a bowl of popcorn, perhaps smuggled up by one of my siblings.

I thought I would go mad then, and now here I am having spent so many years on my own in a room. A Room of One's Own, as Virginia Woolf observed. A room of my own. I do like having a room of my own. But I also like company. I don't like the house arrest part. But I like the retreat. A room of one's own - that's a positive, affirmative thing. I didn't have a "room of my own" the day my mother exiled me to that hapless orange semi-public space at the top of the stairs. It is no wonder to me at all that most of the relationships in that family have been severed. Growing up in that house was a cruel experience for me. I marvel at the house I live in now. It's not a big house, and yet it's probably half again larger than the one I grew up in, with two warring parents, and my younger siblings, my two brothers and my sister. In my current house, upstairs there are two bedrooms, roughly the size of the bedrooms of my parents' house. Here, there's an aerie, sunfilled by day, a semi-public office/sitting space, that I think would make a lovely play area for children. My parents' house, when I was growing up, didn't have that kind of buffer zone. At the top of the stairs were two bedrooms, a cramped bath - no working shower!!!! (which is why I have never taken a bath, or desired to, in my adult life) - a window overlooking the church at the top of the hill, and that's it. No bumped out expansive aerie space.

Changing the subject, sort of. Went to the cinema today, saw a very well-received film that showed a lot of sexual grappling between people in love, and then not in love (same couple, over the years). It was a fine movie, beautifully acted, but bleak. I wanted to feel something, watching the lovemaking scenes, which mostly didn't go so beautifully. I suppose they were beautiful to watch, if I could just get past the nervous tittering of seniors at the multiplex.

It used to be for me that lovemaking was if not sustainable, then attainable. For some reason I thought of dildos today (how? why am I associating it with the Chekhov story I'm reading?). I could probably use one. But I can't imagine ever procuring one. I can't imagine the circumstances, either as a person in a shop, or online. I suppose I'm my own worst jailer then.

I keep dreaming - waking dreams mind you - of your shoulders - I'm sure they must be incredibly beautiful. Like a woman's breasts. One can imagine them, through the clothes, but it's just such a completely different thing to behold them, to hold them, to kiss them.

So here I am, up in the aerie, on my own, in a house bigger than the one I grew up in, dreaming of making love, dreaming of you, wondering why disconnects have to be quite as severe as they are, thankful at the same time that the walls aren't pumpkin-orange and that if I can't be with you, that I'm with myself.

Loving you. Sleep tight. XOXO