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The other day, construction workers for PG&E cut a coffin-sized hole in the concrete on the street that my desk faces. The sound was loud, like an electric saw to my skull. It was one of my last Tuesday mornings off. (I start working four days a week soon.) Nobody was home. I didn’t feel like going to a coffee shop. So, I moved my desk.

For the last two-and-a-half years my desk has sat in the same window pod in my room, a divot between the fireplace and the wall, well-suited to this end. When I first moved into the house, I lived in the smaller room next door, but I still wrote at this desk in what has become my room. The smaller room next door is now vacant.

Well, vacant is stretching it. The room is mostly my bicycle garage, housing two bikes, a couple of helmets, pumps and scattered gloves and locks. There are also a few empty boxes destined for the recylcing bin, a pile of linens and a comforter. The wood floor is partially covered by a $20 rug purchased at a thrift store because our downstairs neighbor alerted the landlord to the section of our lease that said 80% of the hardwood floors require rugs. (“Wait, you want us to cover a floor in a room that nobody uses?” – me to rental agency.)

The point is that the room, in terms of both size and contents, is basically a closet. The window faces a different street than the window by the desk in my room, and so last Tuesday, when PG&E started ripping up the road, I moved my desk and chair into the empty room.

For the last week, I’ve been writing in there, and it’s been wonderful. There’s something about closing the door to my room, walking one step and opening the door to another room that makes me feel like I’m going to the office. But I don’t want to make it a true office or invite my roommate to do the same. I like that my writing room is so empty that the sound of the door closing nearly echoes. I have no files, no books, no trash can, no printer, and no papers other than the ones I think I’ll need for that session. The walls are bare, painted some type of off-white, but they might as well be insane asylum white.

There is nothing to look at, think about, distract myself with when I’m in this barren room. It is the perfect spot to write.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 19th, 2008 at 3:48 pm and is filed under Writing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.