I started my days in the lilac room in a crib. I don’t remember these early days, but they were real.

The lilac room with a beautiful castle on a hill with a carriage leading up to it. The lilac room that my mother said “wasn’t finished,” but that’s in her mind. The smallest bedroom of the house, fit just right for the youngest one to get it.

The lilac room’s crib was no match for me. The stories that are told make it seem as if I defeated it early on, yet I couldn’t talk more than a word.

But as I grew out of my crib, I wanted to grow closer with my sister, so I moved to the light green room. Bunk beds made their way into the furniture of our house. The Alice in Wonderland tea party mural that covered her wall was still there.

We used to play as we were cleaning; we used to pretend the beds were a train station. I used to bug her on New Year’s Eve when I was supposed to be napping—I never did like to sleep.

But then it was time for her to move out of the nursery. I moved back into my little lilac room, and Alice was left under another blanket of green.

The bed was placed in the middle of the room to allow for the most efficient fort making. My stuffed animals were overflowing on my bed. The nights were filled with my imagination and teaching the animals who never graduated.

My lilac walls comforted me again. The toys I tried to catch moving rested in this room. The Tinkerbell and Silvermist coloring pages were added to my closet at some point and never made their way from the view of my sweatshirts.

The lilac room watched me grow through years of different obsessions and crafts left to dust and lay unfinished. The lilac room watched my toys become sad as I grew up like Jessie’s owner in Toy Story 2, though our likes differed from beginning to end. The lilac room watched me cool off when my brother made my temperamental self mad. It watched as tears fell from my eyes for reasons I didn’t understand, and reasons that made complete sense to me. It watched me fill a box with dead pointe shoes. It watched me spend less and less time in there as I stayed up until three to finish APUSH.

The lilac room is the room I grew up in. The lilac room knows me.

But I’m moving back into the big room. The green that covered Alice will be under a new coat of blue-green. The trial run for when I actually have to leave my house begins with the simple step of moving the nostalgic room of my childhood.

I am growing up, and I don’t know how I feel about it.