I rent an apartment downtown with a small spare room, the kind where if you lay in the middle and splay out your limbs your toes and palms touch the walls. I turn this room into an office with a fold-up chair and a table for my writing near the window. I never want to work there so I move the table to the corner of my bedroom. The table piles with clothes and loose change and all the things that can’t be dealt with right away.

The spare room looks empty in comparison. I put up photographs taken of insects and trees and rivers. I set candles along a slab of wood on top of the radiator. I put a mat on the floor where I  stretch and think. The room becomes a nothing room, a space where I go when I sense that I need to.

I’m not working. I rent my bedroom out to a summer legal intern. I move into my nothing room. I put a mattress on the floor. I put pillows on top of a blue quilt. The bed fills the whole room. At night, I press my fingers to one wall and my toes to the other to remind myself what the room is for. The law student goes back to school in the fall. I drag my mattress down the narrow hallway into my bedroom. I put the mattress in its frame. I keep the desk in the corner.

A friend from childhood comes to visit me for her birthday. I pump up an air mattress in the nothing room. A few more friends come after that. I leave the mattress up. The room sees a lot of traffic. I start dating a man who always has a joint or two on him. We deflate the mattress and stuff the plastic bed skin on the top shelf of the hall closet. We go back to the nothing room and light all of the candles. We lay in the middle of the room. He passes me a joint. You can imagine what happens next.

I have a daughter now. She radiates from nothing. She tugs on my hand as I stir the powdered cheese into her macaroni. She thinks she is helping. She wants to take her dinner into the nothing room. The door is always open.

“What is this place?” she asks as she bounces between the bathroom and the nothing room, her toothbrush slung over her lip like a cigarette. She sleeps in my bedroom in the corner in a sort of oversized cradle. I don’t answer her question, turning the faucet on to fill her tiny yellow cup with water. I never answer. I want to say something profound. I want to tell her the room is for “everything” or “anything,” but there is something about nothingness that can be spoiled. No one ever told me what it was for.

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Juliana Roth is an artist whose writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Irish Pages, Reckoning, Entropy, VIDA Review, among other publications. She is the creator of the the web series, The University. Learn more about her work at www.julianaroth.com

Art:
Scramble by Bri Gawkoski