When I was in second grade, we learned how to draw three-dimentionally in art class. We started out with drawing spheres (hokay, I didn't draw spheres, I drew circles), and then onto boxes (mine were terribly out of proportion), and then our assignment was to draw a room.
I fell in love with drawing rooms. Mine were, as always, terribly skewed out of proportion, but it was for years one of my favorite thing to draw. I still have that first drawing of a room that I did back in second grade; it's got a pink floor and orange walls, a canopy bed and a toy chest and bookshelves and a hampster and a plant that stretches up to the ceiling and cats. Cats are everywhere. Really, the worst part about the room is the fact that if it was a real room, it would probably be about twenty to thirty feet tall. But ignoring tha fact, it was my dream room.
Interestingly enough, that room also had one other thing; it had a trap door in the ceiling (with a cat looking out from it of course). That trap door drew me to the idea of creating a whole house. It was exciting, being able to connect so many rooms of my own creation.
The problem was, a whole house to myself was going to get lonely. I think it was when I realized this that the idea donned on me. The idea that I dreamed about for years and years and years after this point. So I scrapped (see: placed not-so-neatly in a pile with other drawings) my first picture of my room and started again.
This new bedroom that I drew had one major difference even at the start; instead of that wonderful glorious canopy bed, one whole wall had been replaced with eight or ten nooks, like giant shelves in a bookcase. These nooks all had blankets and pillows and a curtain to pull across and they belonged to me and my nine closest friends. The room was no longer my own room but a room shared with me by everyone I deemed important in my life (aka all the girls in my elementary school class). Suddenly the drawings of the whole house became much more lively. Dogs began to encounter the hundreds of cats living there. More bookcases and videogames were added. Cookies, so many cookies, were in the kitchen. There was a party in that house every night.
I loved this idea. I had always wanted a giant family (at the time when I drew this I didn't even have cousins), this seemed to be the pefect solution.
Over the years the scenario changed. The idea of the cubbyholes in the wall for beds stayed with me all the way through elementary school, but in middle school when my circle of friends grew, I found that I needed more space. We started to inhabit an old school, with two or three of the classrooms serving as bedrooms, and breakfast lunch and dinner in the gym (where we would dine on pancakes constantly, I believe). Sometimes we were all actually related (don't ask me how that worked), sometimes we were all orphans running our own orphanage (money wasn't a problem, we had all been left fortunes by our parents). I had an odd dream in early middle school where were were all living in our old elementary school and playing a giant, slightly deadly, game of capture the flag.
Middle school was also when I and a couple of my friends started getting into Neopets (we were always late to latch onto a fad), and we decided that we lived in a house together with our eight neopets (who were older than we were, don't ask me how that worked) in tow. That idea lasted for years and probably about a hundred comics were created from it.
Then when the idea of living with my friends began to wear off a little (because honestly, our lives simply werent all that interesting), I began to imagine other worlds. That was when I decided I wanted to be a writer, and the first major story I ever wrote was about a group of kids that looked and acted exactly like my friends and myself (but with different names, so they obviously weren't the same people) who had escaped from some sort of genetic mutation testing facility that conveniently gave them all super powers and were now living in a beautiful old three story house together (how did we afford the house? One of us was a computer hacker and managed to hack into the accounts of people that had recently died and that no one cared about and steal their money). That story lasted for years, and eventually ended up that there were a few houses like that full of people who had escaped all across the city (that lab had awful security). That was one of my favorite stories for a long time and involved a lot of people using the house forks to build a tower or "borrowing" someone's new Hummer/Jeep (which always belonged to my alter-ego) and taking it for a joy ride. In early high school the orphan idea came back into place when I came up with the theory that the United States had put a new law into effect that stated that no family could have more than two children. As a result of this law, the entire state of Ohio became the Orphan State, where all the abandoned children ran away to in order to stay alive and not be put into a work house, at least until they were eighteen and became legal. That story existed in many different forms, but always ended up with a group of children (myself included, in one form or another) living in an abandonded college dorm by the name of Stradly or an old church campus.
Late high school found me revisiting my neopets and finding that there were now six or seven between mine and my friends that were living in a house together, alwys getting in fights the way that people who live together normally do (welcome to my bout of starting to become realistic). At the same time came a story about an army (I think it was Russian) attacking and destroying the entire United States, resulting in a family of people coming together who had narrowly escaped the army.
I loved - and still love - the idea of having a house full of people. I didn't realize until I started looking back on my old stories and artwork how much I really in fact craved the idea of having a huge family. Don't get me wrong, I love the family I have, but there's only four of us and I found that at my parents' house I spent hours alone. I loved those hours though. Oddly enough, at the same time that I wanted so desperately to live in a house filled with all fifty of my closest friends, I spent the school days just waiting to get home and be on my own.
Yet see, this summer I moved out of my parents' house. It didn't occur to me at the time, but the house I was moving into was my dream house. Literally. I've daydreamed for so many years about living with the people that I've moved into a house with. I've now got two roommates and five housemates, and although it was hard to get used to having people in the house all the time, I've started to realize just how much of my own dream world I'm living in. Sans the part about us all being orphans or inheriting/stealing large sums of money for rent and food.
I think I'm in heaven.
