The room was for paperwork. That is what it was sold to me as, in my own head — the small room off the hall where the bills would get paid and the folders would live and the year’s receipts would go into a drawer to be dealt with in spring.
The desk is still in there. It is under the wall now, mostly. The bottom row of monitors sits on it, and a coil of extension cord, and the folders are still in the left drawer where they always were, and the drawer still opens if you move a book. I paid the bills at that desk for years. I could pay them there still. I do not, because to sit at the desk now is to sit with the wall about a foot from your face, eleven screens of somebody else’s evening at close range, and that is not a distance the wall was built for. The wall wants your back, not your eyes.
So the room turned around on me. It was for the desk and now it is for the screens, and the desk is the thing in the way. I did not decide that in a day. It went the way a path goes across a lawn — not laid, just walked, until one evening you notice the grass has given up in a line and the line is the truth of where you go.
The receipts are unfiled. They are in the drawer, loose, the spring folder I meant to sort them into still flat and empty behind them. I keep meaning to. The heat off the panels has reached the drawer front; the wood is warm to the hand there now, warmer than the wall, and the top receipt has curled at one corner in the dry heat and I have not pressed it back down.