When you've lived with five other room mates in a tiny cramped apartment, you learn to make use of the little space you have. My first room in an apartment was the size of most people's closets. I shared the room with my best friend from college and we built our necessities around every precious inch.  A single dresser took up one wall. Our twin sized beds took up the adjacent sides and my little roll top desk sat wedged in the middle with a folding chair. Books, art supplies, borrowed CD albums, and clothes threatened to spiral out of control every single day. The space underneath our beds could only lend so much room for stuffing. Our walls had been painted a stale gray by the last impoverished student who lived there, and one of the first things we improvised to make the room more our home was by purchasing a handful of sharpies. The motivation behind it had been inspired by cheap wine and a poet friend who rambled like Bukowski on his worse days, and spun poems of stained silver and gold on his best days. Quotes from Yeats, Salinger, Kerouac, and Plath climbed the walls in no discernible order.
As the school year progressed, visiting friends would leave their own mark on our walls. I was acquainted with Arthur Miller's granddaughter, the iconic American playwright who wrote Death of a Salesman, and I remember her scribbling something precious to her mind and soul on my wall while juggling a glass of two buck chuck in her left hand. She was poised on my bed, resting on her knees, as she wrote with succinct precision. Unfortunately, I can't recall the quote. There'd been so many. Excerpts of Neil Gaiman, personal tracts left unsigned, an homage to Walt Whitman, and the occasional sketch festooned the walls like a mural of words written by UCLA's small group of literature enthusiasts. Not everyone took to our vigorous dedication to the written word so pleasantly. A girl none of us knew, a party crasher, had stumbled into the room one night looking for more alcohol and after looking around the room, had denounced the beautiful dreams our walls harboured as “crazy writing.” She had not been well received.
Unfortunately, given the lack of space, it was nearly impossible to spread out and study in our cramped cave of a room. My room mate and I opted to do most of our work in the living room on a makeshift coffee table that dreamed of dying and entering the pristine gates of Ikea. We learned to mitigate the complications of our room and apartment to suit our basic living necessities. On the occasion that our shower flooded or mold began to crust our kitchen sink, we either attacked the problem, or ran to the girls' apartment downstairs for their facilities. It was often the latter.
Looking back on that time now, I can't help but feel nostalgic, that sweet aching sense that I had something altogether precious and unattainable two years ago. Strangely, this sentiment doesn't change the fact that I would never live under those circumstances again. Having sex at that place was nearly impossible and there was no sense of privacy to be had, not to mention the bathroom was in a perpetual state of deterioration. But the facts of the past can hardly disenchant my present recollections, and now, with my own beautiful little office, a room three times the size of the former, and a lovely bathroom in working order, I can't exactly say when I felt more alive.