What's your favorite place?

By Charina SM

A few months ago I saw this picture that the author Michael Lorde shared on facebook; and it brought back a lot of memories from my childhood. Many of you know that I grew up in the Dominican Republic. If there is one thing you can say about the small town of Quisqueya, San Pedro De Macoris is that it is a loud place. It doesn’t matter how quiet the people of your house are; truth is that the animals, motorcycles, neighborhood’s kids, neighbors, and people selling things are loud enough for you not to have a moment of complete peace in your head. There is always something going on that will get your attention whether you want it or not. Because of all these things, I have developed a love for a very specific room in my house - The bathroom.

Now, don’t get the wrong idea. The thing about the bathroom was that it was the only place quiet enough for me to hear my own thoughts. I could block all of the outsides noises and concentrate on one single thing at a time. There were no family members calling me to do chores. There were not friends trying to get me out of the house. There were no people being rudely loud next to me. There was just me. For as long as I wanted to, because no one tries to bug you when you are in the bathroom.

So, every day when it was my turn to take a shower, I would go in and it was like walking into another dimension. I played with the water; created random situations in my head, with characters that were amazingly awesome. I pretended that I was them, and said their dialogs out loud. There were days when I played for two hours or more. Then, when I got tired of being a witch with super powers; or the princess with a family that didn’t want her to have adventures with her friends, I would take my shower and get out. It used to drive my family up the wall. They couldn’t explain how one person could spend so much time taking a shower.

One day my step mother spied on me, to know what took so long. Of course, I was talking to myself and she freaked out and told my dad that I was losing it. I mean how can you explain that you were just repeating the dialog of the voices in your head, without sounding like a schizophrenic? I was extremely angry. She trespassed the privacy of the bathroom, and she also trespassed my magical kingdom. And the worst part was that she didn’t even notice it. My father trying to keep the peace of the house, asked her to let me be. I think, in a way he was the only one who understood what I was doing. Or maybe, he didn’t want me to feel uncomfortable when I visited him.

Today I still have a lot of characters with random situations in my head. But I don’t have to go to the bathroom to get to my magical kingdom anymore. Now I have my bedroom to do that. I don’t think I will ever stop doing that. It is not something I can control. Sometimes I find myself doing something, and I completely space out. It is a part of who I am. It has made life more interesting and sometimes easier to deal with. Because the world in my head is a hundred times more amazing than the one I live in.

What is your favorite place in the house? Why?