Before my sister graduated and moved out, the room in the very back of our house was a bright, awful yellow, radiating off the walls and burning the eyes of anyone unlucky enough to lay their gaze upon it. I remember sitting on her bed, all naivete and childlike bliss, while she tried harder and harder to make my hair look exactly like Pebbles’ from The Flintstones. It was an interesting way to pass the time; I was just happy to sit and gaze at the awful walls while she tugged and pulled at my hair. Sometimes, if she wasn’t delving into experimental cosmetology, she would turn on Cha-Cha Slide on her awfully large stereo (how 2004) and try to teach me the dance moves. I was never very good at dancing, to say the least.
Nevertheless, I have extremely vivid, aesthetic memories of her room from my early childhood, most likely because she was a teenager and, as teenagers were obviously the coolest things ever in the eyes of a six year old, I looked up to her in the way someone can only look up to an older sister. Her room was a center of learning for me: how to do hair, how to dance, how not to paint your walls. Each time I walk in there, it’s almost as if I can still feel her tugging at my hair with all the concentration she could muster.