Abandoned

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The Abandoned Vanity

We made plans to breathe new life into an abandoned vanity.

I had gotten stuck with this baby blue vanity where I lived on top (6th) floor of my apartment building. It had belonged to an old roommate who painted it an ugly shade of baby blue. He had told me that he would come back for it eventually but never did when I moved out a year later.

So to save money, I had decided to just take it with me instead of risking the fine for leaving it in the apartment. I could not afford to hire movers to help me move in with my friend, but they only had a short window to get everything out of my 6th-floor apartment with a tiny elevator.

Right before I had moved out, I assessed the vanity to see if I could do something to make it less of an eyesore. The vanity had three drawers on the top and empty spaces underneath the drawers.

One day, I had discovered that the ugly blue paint was slowly beginning to peel off. I ripped one piece off to reveal a black finish. I love black, and I preferred it over the ugliest shade of baby blue I had ever seen. So I kept peeling and peeling, (I couldn't help myself) and eventually, I had peeled off so much that now this vanity, still in decent condition, desperately needed a makeover.

When I had moved the vanity into my new place, it was still summertime, and my friends and I were bored with nothing better to do. So they started thinking of ideas of how to help me repaint and redesign the vanity. We bought a bunch of different kinds of spray paints, new paintbrushes, and a lot of black acrylic paint to fill in the spaces and go over any mistakes. Finally, we decided on the theme: turn the vanity into a starry galaxy, complete with a solar system, stars, constellations and even an alien in a spaceship.

After buying all the materials, we spent too much of our afternoon trying to remove the stubborn blue color painted directly on the wood itself. But once the ugly blue paint became too much of a hassle to remove, I was the only one left still trying. I didn't simply want to paint over it, and then have it peel off a few months later; I wanted to completely redo it so that it would potentially last. We had even thought of buying paint thinner and paint remover, but nothing worked.

Our friend group slowly began to deteriorate before I could get more paint off to actually start redesigning the vanity. Our problems seemed to get worse, and before I knew it, the vanity project became another problem too. The summer art project was supposed to help us bond again and fix what may have been broken. But, we had abandoned it again outside my new apartment before the summer ended.

Gone were the days we would hang out and make plans. Gone were the days of all of us getting along while the vanity continued to rot outside, waiting for someone to either kill it or finally finish it. I let it stand outside for six more months, the rain, snow, and wind turning it into a pile of wood. This made it easier to throw into the dumpster when I moved out mid-winter because our friend group (which included my roommate) had imploded.

It was no longer a vanity, but instead a sad reminder of abandoned plans and irreparable relationships. I should have just thrown it out in the first place; you can't fix trash.

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