...it can stay, I don't have to - part 2...

Remember that time I wrote about The Wall?

Well, I did what I set out to do.

I stopped it from being the focal point, and went ahead and worked my way around it.

In fact, I jumped right on  that task the following day.

(Ikea to the rescue!)

We took our measurements, noting just how much room it was taking up.  Carefully lining up the tape to see how far it protruded into our space.  Top to bottom.  Side to side.  Deepest crevice to sharpest point.  The rock wall just sat there, immovable and implacable.   Up close and personal...noting each inch...I saw its ugliness.  Gray and brown rocks of no consequence or complemement.  Some glossy.  Others lusterless.   Dusty film adhered to that sticky coating of time or humidity or sealant...indeterminate.  I felt the crumbling plaster holding it together.  I saw chips in its grim face...where someone else-sometime else...must have tried to move around it or past it, and come up short.  The crash of one solid object into another...unyielding.  Fracture lines crazed around those chips...a testament to both its lifelong strength and eventual weakness.  

I saw its ugliness.

And didn't care.

Already, just by measuring it, I had rendered it defunct.

The Wall-In the Living Room-With the Measuring Tape.

I win! (Remember the game 'Clue'?)

We sprinted in the homestretch, down the corridors of Ikea.  Rounding each corner with purpose.  Eyeing up each shelf and cabinet...debating dimensions...focusing first on form, then on function.

Finally settling our sights on the one.  The Brusali cabinet, in white...

Discussed. Dissected. Decided.

Done.

Home we came with his new cabinet, my new office drawers (and more than a few other bits and pieces, because...Ikea?!?) and a concrete plan: he to organize, I to assemble.

It's fixed now.  The Wall.  Fixed in the spayed/neutered sense of the word.  Its there...sort of...but completely overshadowed.  There, but unnoticed.

The cabinet pulls the room together.  Brings order to the space.  Closed doors hide his toolboxes and supplies.  Shelves bear the weight of education...binders and files and textbooks organized, just so.   And high up on the top shelf, his current favourite Transformers hold court.

(The rest are banished to storage bins until we move!)

The room makes sense now.  It's ready for the life that happens in it.

The Wall is stopped.  I took it's place and made space from it...space for him.  

***The Wall is still there.  The Wall is still ugly.  But somehow, remarkably, it's nigh on invisible behind the sensible and serviceable piece that now stands before it...behind the life I built beyond it.

~Leanna