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epitome of incomprehensibility
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My bedroom has two "crawl spaces", triangular prisms of cavities between the walls of the room and those of the sloping roof. Inside is rough wood, above and below, and various stored items: suitcases, cookie tins, a bin full of wrapping paper rolls.
One corner of the right-side crawl space has a tunnel that leads to a "secret room": if I go on my hands and knees, I enter a smaller rectangular prism, parallel to the hall outside my bedroom, and it's less than two metres before it opens up into a rectangular prism room, parallel to my parents' room.
I discovered this when I was ten. I let my brother and friend in on the secret. They went in with me. I told my mother. She didn't, but she seemed interested when I showed her the passage, shone a light through it so she could see the room.
Cool, dusty wood above and below. Not "finished". But nicely rectangular, with a different charm than the triangley crawl spaces. I stored a kit full of colour-them-yourself stickers there - one needed something to do in a secret room - and they got a little less sticky in the damp.
When I was a teenager, Mom had an expansion done on the master bedroom, knocking back the wall and claiming some of the secret room for shelf space.
Why did I mind? I wasn't playing there anymore. I could still go in. It's closer than the secret_park, just seconds from where I still sleep. But now it's not nicely rectangular anymore. Poor, narrow, misshapen, mishappened. Like the past I miss and wish happened differently.
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