Location: New Pembroke 4 Dormitory, Brown University

I wake up every morning in my dorm. My bed, my desk, my chair, my dresser, my rug, my posters. In other words, I am arrogant. When I think long enough though, my room begins to unravel into its constituent parts. And these will never belong to me.
I begin in what is, for me, the epicenter of the city. This would seem like a logical starting point to take root and twist my veins out into the soil of Providence. And it is in some ways. It is sturdy, it is warm, it is dependable as a place to come home to. It begs few questions.
But it has a hidden history that I am only beginning to expose. I will start, like I do each morning, with my bed. I normally take my comforter for granted. Today I think of the down that keeps me warm. Perhaps a decade ago it insulated the wings of a goose and kept it warm miles above the leafless trees in a November sky. I throw this aside, get up, and pull on a cotton T-shirt. On my shoulders rests a white dusted field in Georgia somewhere, back when my shirt was a just a bundle of fiber nestled in among thousands of its kind. I look into my mirror and I see the beach, the million grains of sand that, before they were melted down, served as a welcome mat for every passing tide. And the trees of the frame; stalwart guardians of the shore for centuries. And now the beach and the forest are gracing my room except they have been squeezed into the shape of a rectangle. All I usually see when I look at them is myself. The same goes for the pages of the books and the posters on my walls. Great forests squeezed into rectangles. The one poster I own of the Grand Tetons is especially ironic. Maybe the evergreens in the picture helped make the paper it was printed on. My eyes travel from my walls up to the ceiling, to the criss-crossing pipes. Back in the day they used to snake down into the Earth’s crust, part of a vein of lead ore, down deep with the earthquakes and the magma. Now they are painted white and hang still from my ceiling, channeling water to my emergency sprinkler. Finally a bag of sunflower seeds on my roommate’s desk. At one point they rested atop an enormous yellow flower that always turned its petals towards the sun.
I stare at my feet and try to rewind the clocks, to bring my room and everything in it back a century. Now my room is filled not with posters but with pieces of tree, not with mirrors but with pieces of beach, not with comforters but with pieces of goose. Why do we never say this? Pieces of cotton, pieces of ore, pieces of flower. Why do I own leather shoes and bottled water instead of the pieces of a cow hide and an underground aquifer, respectively? From now on I’ll try only to see the unraveled pieces. An entire national park has been squeezed into my dorm room.