Blue Room 🛏️

Loneliness has never been about being alone. I have felt it in crowds, in homes full of family, in rooms buzzing with voices. It is not the silence of solitude I know—it is something older, deeper, stitched into my chest. It is a weight in my stomach, a tightness around my heart, a companion that clings when I try to laugh or speak or reach for someone. It has been with me since I was a child, a shadow from the very beginning.

I think back to the blue room, where it first took shape. I was nine, taken from the only home I had ever known, my grandmother’s. I didn’t understand why. Strangers—people who called themselves family—led me away. I remember the blue walls, neat and ordered, the twin bed I was told to make myself comfortable in. Comfort never arrived. The room was too quiet, too still, and my heart throbbed in protest.

Blue was my favorite color even then, though I could not have explained why. Now I wonder if it was because it mirrored something I couldn’t yet name: the depth of feeling inside me, the ache I carried, the quiet sadness that made me feel both separate and whole at once. Blue is calm but infinite, comforting yet isolating, like the way I have always felt in the world—seen in glimpses but never entirely contained.

Weeks passed without a word from my grandmother. I missed the chaotic warmth of her home, the noise, the smells, the feeling of being rooted. And I was left with the weight of absence, with the pressing, unrelenting ache of not belonging. The blue walls seemed to expand and contract with my pulse. Loneliness, I learned then, could live inside you, grow inside you, until it felt like it belonged more to you than your own skin.

Then she came. My grandmother entered the blue room, and for a few brief hours, the world made sense again. She hugged me until my ribs ached, kissed me until my cheeks burned, and showed me a flower growing from her arm. I believed it was magic. In my nine-year-old heart, it was. She told me she loved me, that I had always been her daughter, and that my mother, who I had never known, was in heaven. That day, the room felt alive. I felt seen. I felt full.

But only for a moment. That night, she left. And I never saw her again. No days passed before the truth hit like a stone: she had gone to join my mother in heaven. The blue room became more than walls and furniture—it became the vessel for a grief I could not name, for a loneliness I could not escape. It became the place where absence settled, and I learned that the people who love you most can disappear, and the world keeps turning.

Even now, the blue room lingers. I feel it in crowded spaces, in family gatherings, in moments when my chest tightens for no reason. I think about how that room shaped me, how the fear of being a burden, of taking up too much space, seeped into my bones. Loneliness is not something I can flee; it is part of me, a quiet rhythm beneath the clamor of life.

And yet, I hold on to the memory of her embrace, of that flower on her arm, of the way she told me I was loved. I carry both absence and love together, as if by holding both I might one day understand how to belong. The blue room is not just a memory. It is a lens, a color that shades every connection, every ache, every fleeting moment of joy. Blue is more than my favorite color—it is my grief, my solace, my constant. It is the beginning of my loneliness, yes—but it is also where I first learned that love can exist even when it cannot stay.

The blue room is mine. It follows me, lives in me, and waits. And in its quiet, I continue to search for the pieces of myself I left there, hoping, one day, to feel whole again.