A Love Letter to My Adolescent Bedroom

A time capsule of millennial girlhood, circa 2009.

Are you getting the sense that I really liked Harry Potter, Twilight, and the color pink? Like, a LOT.

On a recent trip back home, I unearthed a treasure trove of old cell phones – beautiful, chunky, plastic flip and slider phones with full keyboards, through which I had conducted the majority of my social life from 2007-2011.

When we got home, my husband, a connoisseur of old tech, found the right cord to plug them in and figure out if there were any photos left on them. And lo and behold, we found plenty of ephemera from my high school years – football games, inside jokes I’ve long forgotten, and there, like a gift I’d given myself 15 years before – a series of photos of my bedroom, circa 2009 or 2010. Taken on an ordinary day, my bed unmade, the detritus of my every obsession strewn around, a perfect encapsulation of the things I loved and the way I lived, half long-since forgotten, half seared indelibly into my memory.