Two Rooms, Not Separated
Emmi Itäranta（Finland）
I find myself standing in a room.
There is a comfortable chair with pale beige upholstery and arched wooden armrests. The octagonal table next to it is just wide enough to place a book, a notebook, a pen, and a coffee cup. The walls are painted a cream colour, and the rug on the floor is dark green. A large cat is sleeping on it, an orange half-moon. I squat down to pet his head. He coos softly.
Every item in this room is a real object I have seen and touched. You might say this is a static depiction of what the essence of my life looks like.
I am going to call this room Documentary.
On the wall opposite the chair, there is a doorway. I walk through it.
I find myself standing in another room.
At first glance it looks completely different from the first one. The colour of the walls is impossible to name because it keeps changing. It is also hard to tell how many walls there are, or how large the room is. A coffee cup floats in the air, doing occasional somersaults, yet somehow the coffee does not spill. Furniture appears out of thin air. A velvet sofa transforms into a flying pine tree with star-shaped flowers, then into a talking spaceship. It shifts shape so fast that I lose track.
This other room holds everything I have ever imagined, or have seen others imagine. I keep organising it, but it keeps growing new corners and passages, trapdoors and balconies, glowing forests hanging from the ceiling and purple rivers in the middle of the floor.
I call this room Fiction.
The fourth wall of the room – right now there are four – is translucent from this side. I can see the other room through it: the chair, the rug, the cat. Small clouds drift between the rooms in both directions. I place my palm on the wall. My hand sinks in, like it would into water.
I hear a voice.
“Who are you?”
I turn around and see my younger self. She is maybe eight years old. I should have known she’d be hiding here. Her words do not sound quite correct: I would not have asked a strange adult such a question at that age. I was too shy. But since we are in Fiction, I let it go.
She has light brown hair, a key hanging from a cord around her neck, and poor eyesight (in two years’ time she will need spectacles, which she will hate). She is holding a book: Five on a Hike Together by Enid Blyton.
“I’m you,” I say.
She regards me somewhat critically. She thinks I’m old. She’d prefer me to be prettier. But she doesn’t seem surprised. She spends enough time here to be able to conceive of such a thing.
“What are you doing?”
She looks at my hand, still wrist-deep in the wall.
“Exploring the boundary between Documentary and Fiction,” I tell her. I nod toward the other room. “You don’t like it very much out there, do you?”
“It’s boring.”
“Would you have a look with me anyway?”
She sighs dramatically, but steps closer to me. We gaze at the room in silence: the chair, the rug, the cat. After a while she places her hand on the liquid surface and begins to draw patterns with her finger. After each pattern, she gives it a light push. Things appear in the other room: the chair becomes a golden throne, the ceiling turns into a night sky full of stars, the book morphs into a large blue bird and flies away.
“What are you doing?” I ask.
“Decorating.”
Of course. I used to do that: make reality more interesting by adding some fiction to it. In fact, I still do that.
“But then you walk into that room,” she continues, “and it’s all gone. I prefer it here.”
“I’ll tell you a secret,” I say. “It’s not a different room at all. This wall is not real. We just… sort of agreed that it was there.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, in some ways it is real. You don’t survive in the world if you don’t know the difference between the imaginary and the real. You can’t jump off a roof and think a magic spell will save your life. That only happens in fiction. But the wall is not solid. It’s porous. Look.”
I pull my hand out of the wall. Ripples spread in all directions. Droplets spill onto each side. Clouds drift, change colour, and those colours change the rooms.
“What’s happening?” the girl, the younger me, asks.
“Everything in the real world shapes things in here,” I say. “But it works both ways. Anything born in here also has the potential to change things in the real world. Everything humans ever built had to exist in the imagination first. And everything that exists in Fiction -”
“-was imagined by someone,” she says. Our voices are two, yet one.
We watch the two rooms again in silence. I notice subtle shifts: the wall behind my chair changes colour; a rug appears beneath our feet, made from dark green moss. The spaces are never identical, but they strive to resemble each other and shape each other in the process.
I watch the Documentary of my life that is the other room. I think of how the semblance of reality may be the most fictional thing of all: it is only achieved through careful selection and organisation of material. Everything that is not included is excluded. Everything that is included is subject to biases: the fallibility of memory, the subjectivity of our experience, the limitations of our fragile human bodies, the messages we wish to convey. Even non-fictional narrators can be unreliable.
My younger self takes a step forward. Then she is standing inside the wall that is simply an agreement between people, the wall that exists and yet is not real.
“Where am I now?” she asks. “In Documentary or Fiction?”
You decide, I wish to tell her. It is your call. The rooms were never separate at all.
But she has to reach that conclusion herself for it to be worth something.