I tap the square symbol on the ancient device with two connected triangles that pointed to the left, as if the left meant the past. The barely adequate speaker was emitting the strangest beeping noise as the scene reversed quickly. My dad’s unmistakable voice booms from behind the video camera that pans across our vacant backyard. “Maybe this time next year, we’ll have some grass or something!” Extremely dry light brown dirt and piles of grayish gravel litter the space as if someone had just left in the middle of the work day and never returned. I press the two triangles that pointed to the right this time, the screen began to move quickly again. The camera angle turned around and moved downwards to reveal a little blonde girl smiling way too big for someone missing their front teeth. I press pause and look at the date: 08/17/2007.

A reddish mark forms on the side of my left knee as I uncross my legs. My feet find the floor, and as I dig my toe into the carpet it feels the same as it has for the past twelve years. The softness wore off far too quickly, probably before we even moved in my white Pottery Barn bunk beds, or spent hours sweating over the Swedish manuals of Ikea furniture. The version of the bedroom I see right at this present moment does not look the same as it did one year ago, or the year before that or the year before that. The white desk with a purple nail polish stain in the left corner and accidentally engraved words from my ballpoint pen has seen every corner. My ten year old arms were stronger than my parents thought. I moved my bed against a new wall every year, and I later realized my habit for reorganizing was merely a way for me to change such a simple part of my life, if only just slightly. Don’t get me wrong the nostalgia still seems to flow through this space all the same, but it has never actually been the same.

Staring at my bubblegum pink wall, I think of all the colors that were suffocated behind it over the years at the hands of my indecisive mind. Lemon yellow covered the default white walls in the beginning, my mom’s choice, not mine, and for the next five years I was blinded by the light of the sun’s reflection every morning. During my ‘Zen’ phase, I begged to paint my walls olive green to match my new white duvet that had vines of ivy crawling across it. A sheer canopy decorated with fake leaves fell from my ceiling, brushing the floor around my bed. Something felt wrong about the simplicity. Now, this sickly cotton candy background that currently surrounds me is completely my own fault.

The color of my bedroom is not the only thing about this house that has sustained constant change in this house. My dad was a dreamer back then. He stood on that dirt lot with hope in his eyes and not much else in his pockets. Every Sunday was spent at the construction site after church, my little brother and I playing kickball with only one person per team. The ball ended up skewered multiple times by rusty nails and sharp rocks. When the foundation finally took its shape distinguishing each room, I’d loudly announce that I am going to my room and march through the potential house dodging the metal steaks jutting out of the floor. I proceed to sit in my concrete square on the cold hard ground and pull out my favorite book. I’d read it so many times, the binding was coming apart in the middle, pages were stained with peanut butter fingers.

The months flew by, and I blew out the candles on my ninth birthday cake that sat on a plastic folding table in the “kitchen”. Running through the walls, always making sure we were wearing shoes so that we didn’t step on a stray nail, we played laser tag for hours. We spent our first thanksgiving in that house under the starlight of the late November sky. I thanked the missing roof and existing beams of wood above our heads for that. Gathered around a store-bought ham (we couldn’t trust mom to cook a turkey), my dad raised his plastic glass of red wine proclaiming sarcastically, “To family and our beautiful home, maybe next year we will have a roof over our heads!” Chuckles from all around the folding table, inaudible clinks. We dug in with our fake metallic forks and knives that my mom called “classy plasticware.” But I loved our house just as much then as I do now. I loved jumping up and down on the wooden planks of scaffolding as much as I love sitting in the living room during Christmas watch Elf for the two hundredth time. The smell of fresh paint and newly installed drywall, or the pungent burning scent of my mom attempting to cook the turkey (when we installed an oven of course) for the fourth year in a row. All of it.

The omnipresent gravel crunches underneath the weight of my wheels as I swerve into the driveway. It took exactly four songs to get home from my wonderful all-girls Catholic high school, where everyone was nice all the time, and I never ran to my car at the last bell to get out of the parking lot as soon as possible. I opened the side door which I used to be able to run right through about eight years prior. There is something so magical about watching your future home being built on all sides of you as a child. Even when the housing market crashed and everything just paused, it reminded me that everything is a process. A forced stop meant to help you get back on your feet. My seventeen year-old eyes glanced at the gaping hole in the yard that hadn’t seen a shovel in months. You don’t always have to be moving forward to grow. At least now we had a roof over our heads and a kitchen table.

I threw my floral backpack down as I entered my room, it was ripped and bursting at the seams with advanced placement textbooks. I snatched my red fender acoustic and sunk into the white decorative pillows that consumed my queen bed. The smell of new paint stung my nose. I thought that after a week it would dissipate. I initially chose this color because I thought it would make me feel the joy that it screamed at me in the sample swatch aisle of Home Depot. Now, the light rose felt like I was looking at a lawn filled with flamingos. My guitar strings absorb the feelings, and I feel sorry for them.

This house, though not what I am referring to when I talk about my current home, shaped me as I have seen it continuously being shaped. And that white, yellow, green, pink room was my most faithful companion on the darkest of nights. Sometimes I remember what it was like to feel the concrete foundation and nothing else, and think of how much has changed since then, for the worse, but especially for the better. At twenty-one, sitting cross-legged on my bed, with my blushing walls and scratchy carpet, my old guitar that felt everything I did, my first poster of Taylor Swift, nail polish stained desk, I know that this is not where i am meant to be forever. Even if there are many moments of my past that I’m surely not fond of, even if I feel that without a doubt I have found something better, it’s my first home. And I’ll always want to see it change.