My year of adventures can be contained in two small boxes, one full of photographs, trinkets, and cute little gifts from my lover who seems to find the beauty in everything.

The other box, stamped with the logos of small midwestern town stores is full to the rim with ugly clothes and toiletries that weren't lost in the band tour across all fifty. Everything in my room looks foreign except those boxes and the faux black dahlias hanging off my curtain rods.

It's snowing outside, white flurries floating down to the doorsteps covered in ice where all the stray cats make their home until the weather calms and turns the holiday into a mystical one, hiding everything ugly about the city.

I take a seat at my desk and trace my fingers along lyrics and quotes carefully carved into the wood, each dating back from their years, marking days where they were needed just to give me a reason to keep going. To keep being Ivy.

Sketches of 60's cartoon characters fade from the brown but with the right motivations, I'll find a reason to bring them back. For now, I want nothing more but to reclaim my room and let Christmas take me back to who I was before I became a half-assed idol barely keeping myself from washing away into a history of long-forgotten rock singers.

My pink walls aren't close to beauty but the posters of Freddie Mercury, Jimi Hendrix, and Leslie Gore somehow make it bearable, blotting out the loud color unevenly hinted with deep grey that slides under the ridged paint.

I remember the last hotel I checked into with my band, laying dead on the floor and staring at the popcorn ceiling. The last of 1979. A year spent moving from town to town with other bands who slipped through the map with us for two weeks or less and then said their final goodbyes.

Maybe I'll see a few again in the papers. Maybe on the box tv while I'm eating a television dinner and listening to my mother complain about the weather or how I should be in their place.

Or maybe I'll truly never see them again because that's just how life is.

Probably the reason why I don't stop singing about my depression, change my style or do something with this room of mine that isn't childish Garfield comforters or posters of musicians I'll never measure up to. I can't stand change or too much faith falling.

And with that, the glow of the room disappears. I'm a rock musician, pathetically moving through her mother's shophouse in the middle of Minneapolis because she can't grow up. She can't see that not all things are momentarily, that her girlfriend doesn't see the beauty in everything rather doesn't think she's worth more than a three-dollar Florida keychain and that she's a horrible person.

That I, Ivy Wilson am indeed the trash in the bottom of a burn barrel.

An only child born from not the woman I call mom but one who left, married a rich man in New York, and had a daughter worth bragging about. One who'll always have her life perfect and now I'm left between the crossroads of making her life just as horrific as mine or letting her have her fairy tale ending.

I walk across my floor, digging my toes into the carpet. It warms the bottom but the top of them stays cold, leaving my skin a hint of grey. I think of her in every inch of the expanse, my sister who'd look down on this.

Her beautiful eyes, like the ones that look down at me with judgment from the mini tv in the corner. I remember her skin, unblemished and soft like the smooth baseboards that aren't touched by patches of mold.

And here I am, everything that she lacks I have the misfortune of being cursed with.

I'm still standing and now the room spins in flashes of colors. Dull shades of orange and pink, slices of brilliant dark blue with white from the cold outside world. My childhood room is hard to describe, all I see is what I hate about it like I'm in my mind and not between the walls anymore.