Who Are You Lighting Up For?

You bought them on a Sunday in late October. Twenty minutes of scrolling through a feed that knows you better than your mother does, and the cart filled itself. LED strip lights. The kind with the little remote that promises to turn a cinder-block dorm room into something you might actually want to sit inside.

You told yourself it was practical. You’ll use them as a desk lamp for late-night studying. You’ll use them as a night light so you don’t have to fumble for your phone across the dark. You’ll use them because the overhead fluorescent in your room flickers in a way that makes your temples ache, and at least these won’t flicker. At least these will be yours.

The package arrived in a brown plastic mailer with no padding. The strip coiled inside like a thin plastic intestine. You unrolled it on your comforter and the adhesive backing peeled away with the soft ripping sound of tape pulled off skin. You pressed it along the back edge of your desk, smoothing it with the side of your thumb, and there was something almost tender about the whole thing — this small act of fitting a piece of your imagined life onto a piece of furniture you didn’t choose, in a room you didn’t choose, in a building full of people you didn’t choose.

You plugged it in.

The room turned violet, then a deep bruised blue, then a pale washed-out pink that reminded you of something you can’t quite name. A hospital waiting room. The bedroom of a girl you went to high school with, photographed from the doorway. The first time the light came on, your chest did something tight and small. Not joy, exactly. More like recognition. Like you had finally bought the version of yourself you had been scrolling past for months.

You stood back from the desk. You sat down on the bed. You stood back up again.

And nobody was there.

Tuesday, 7:14 p.m. You are sitting on the concrete step outside the side entrance of the dining hall, your phone in one hand, a granola bar wrapper in the other. The air has the metallic taste of late autumn and the parking lot lights are already on, throwing long yellow rectangles across the asphalt. You are thinking about the strip lights. Not whether they were worth the small amount of money — they were, you tell yourself, they were — but whether anyone you know will ever see them.

You are twenty years old. You have 1,247 followers on the account your real self uses. You have a room you will leave in fourteen months. You have a roommate you exchange pleasantries with and a major you chose because your mother said it was practical. And now you have a glowing room.

The thing about a glowing room is that you have to sit in it alone to know if it works.

You turn the lights on every night now. Sometimes at 6 p.m., right after dinner, when the sky outside your window has gone the color of a bruise. Sometimes at 11 p.m., when the rest of the building has gone quiet and the hallway sounds have shrunk to the hum of someone’s fan through the wall. The remote has a button that fades between colors and you press it sometimes just to watch the room breathe. Purple to blue to a soft amber that you have decided is your favorite, although you couldn’t say why.

You have started noticing the way the light lands on your hands. The way your face looks in the small mirror above your dresser when the room is washed in pink. The way your laptop screen and the strip light together make you look like a person who has a life that someone might want to photograph. You don’t photograph it, though. Not yet. You just look.

This is the part you can’t quite explain to yourself. The part where you buy something small and cheap to fix a feeling you can’t quite name, and then the feeling doesn’t go away, but you keep buying. A plant that will die by spring. A poster from a movie you haven’t watched. A candle that smells like a coffee shop. A strip of LED lights that turns a room the color of a feeling.

I know this is dumb. I know you’re reading this and thinking, it’s just lights, who cares. But stick with me for a minute. Because the lights are not the point. The lights were never the point.

The lights are the evidence. The receipt for a transaction you keep making with yourself, over and over, in small denominations. A transaction that says: I will feel better when my room is nicer. I will feel better when my clothes fit differently. I will feel better when the light is the right color. The transaction almost always goes through. The feeling almost never arrives.

You press the button. The room turns amber. You sit down at your desk. You open your laptop. And the room is still just a room.

Your palms get a little sweaty when you think about the next thing I am going to say, which is this: the lights are not for you. They might have been for you the first night, the way a new shirt feels like a new self for an hour. But by the second night, and the third, you know they aren’t for you. You sit in a room alone and the light is on and there is no one to see it but you, and you have started to know, in some quiet place under your ribs, that this is not the version of you that you were shopping for.

So who are they for?

The question sits on your chest like a small animal.

You could answer it, probably. They’re for the person who might come over someday. They’re for the version of you who will eventually have friends over to study, or to drink, or just to sit on the floor and complain. They’re for the future you who will have a real apartment and a real bed frame and a real life, who will look back at the dorm and laugh about the strip lights and how serious you took all of it.

But the future you is a fiction you are paying for in monthly installments of small purchases. The future you might never materialize. The present you, the one sitting on the bed at 11:42 p.m. with the strip lights on amber, is the only version that has ever existed. And the present you is alone with a piece of plastic that pretends, very gently, to be a life.

There is a particular kind of loneliness that does not announce itself. It is not the loneliness of being unwanted. It is the loneliness of being curated. The loneliness of sitting in a room you have spent small amounts of money to make exactly right, and finding that exactly right is not a place you can stay in for very long. The loneliness of pressing a button to change the color of your ceiling and feeling, for a moment, that something has shifted, and then feeling, in the next moment, that nothing has.

The breath in your chest goes shallow when you think about how much time you have spent, in the past year, choosing things. Choosing the right pillow. Choosing the right desk lamp. Choosing the right playlist for a Friday night you are spending in your room with the door closed. Choosing the right filter for the photo you don’t post. Choosing the right color of light to sit inside while you choose all the other things.

Your stomach drops a little when you notice the pattern. Because the pattern is this: you are very good at making a life. You are very bad at having one.

And then, on the nights when the room is quiet and the strip lights are on and the silence is so soft you can hear your own pulse in your ears, you ask yourself the question you have been avoiding.

What are you trying to make beautiful?

The light has become a kind of weather. You check it the way you used to check the sky. Some nights it has to be amber. Some nights blue. Some nights you press the off button entirely and sit in the dark for a while, just to feel the difference, just to know that you could have the room any way you wanted and tonight the way you wanted it was nothing at all.

You have started to think of the strip lights as a kind of company. Not in the way you would say out loud, not in a way that would make your roommate raise an eyebrow. But there is a small warmth in knowing the room will be there tonight, in the color you choose, waiting. There is a small comfort in the fact that the light does not ask you anything. The light does not need you to be interesting. The light does not care that you haven’t called your mother back. The light just glows.

This is, if you are honest with yourself, the lowest bar you have ever set for companionship. And the fact that the bar is being cleared is the loneliest thing of all.

You take a photo once. Not to post — you tell yourself — just to see what the room looks like from the outside. You prop the phone against a stack of books on the dresser and sit on the bed and arrange your face into something you have seen other people’s faces do in similar photos. A slight smile. A look that says, I am comfortable here. A look that says, this is the life I chose.

You look at the photo for a long time. In the photo, the room looks like a small museum of a person. The poster from a movie you haven’t watched. The mug from a campus event you didn’t really enjoy. The candle that smells like a coffee shop, unlit because you keep meaning to. And the light, casting everything in amber, the only thing in the room that is actually doing the work it was bought to do.

You don’t post it. You delete it instead, and then you delete it again from the recently deleted folder, because some part of you does not want even the algorithm to know what your room looks like when nobody is watching.

There is a moment, somewhere around the second week, when you realize you have stopped turning the lights on. Not on purpose. You just forget. You come home from a class you didn’t take notes in, and you drop your backpack on the chair and open your laptop and start a paper you will regret starting, and the room is just the room. The fluorescent overhead is the only light. The strip is behind the desk, dark, waiting, the adhesive curling slightly at one corner like a small leaf losing its grip.

You notice it one night at 1 a.m. You are sitting in the dark with the laptop open and you realize you cannot remember the last time you pressed the button. And something in your stomach turns over, not with sadness exactly, but with a quiet recognition that you have moved on. That the lights have become part of the room the way the flickering overhead became part of the room — there, ignorable, no longer a project.

You wonder, briefly, if this is what growing up feels like. Not the big things your mother warned you about. Not the heartbreak or the job or the apartment. But the small disappointment of finding out that the version of you who would sit in a beautiful glowing room and feel beautiful too was always a temporary version. A version you could afford for a few weeks, and then could not.

You turn the strip on one last time, near the end of the semester. You are packing. You have taken the poster down and rolled it into a tube. The candle is in a box somewhere. The mug is wrapped in a sweatshirt. You press the button out of a kind of superstition, and the room turns the deep bruised blue, and you stand in the doorway and look at the small glowing rectangle of light behind a desk that won’t be yours in a week.

You take a photo this time. You post it.

The caption reads: “last night in the room.”

You don’t say what you mean, which is: I built a small museum to a person who was never going to live here, and I am leaving the museum behind, and I am taking the admission with me, and I am not going to do this again.

But you will, probably. A different room. A different strip of light. A different color of the same small loneliness. And you will press the button, and the room will glow, and nobody will be there, and you will know, in the quiet place under your ribs, who the light was always for.

It was never for them.

It was for the version of you that still believed that the right color of glow could fix something that was never about the light.