The Gravity of ‘Eternal Trench’

Slapping the alarm clock shouldn’t feel like a high-stakes gamble in a subterranean bunker, yet here I am, fumbling through a gloom so thick it feels structural. It is 7:15 in the morning. At least, the digital display says it is. My eyes, however, are struggling to reconcile that information with the oppressive, ink-stained void that has replaced my bedroom. Last Tuesday, this felt like bravery. Last Tuesday, after 35 minutes of aggressive scrolling through interior design feeds, I decided that my personality was ‘Moody Midnight’ and ‘Victorian Gothic Revival.’ I wanted depth. I wanted a cocoon. What I have instead is a visual representation of a bad mood that refuses to leave the house.

The paint was called ‘Eternal Trench,’ which really should have been the first warning. It’s a blue so deep it has abandoned the concept of color and embraced the concept of gravity. My tongue feels swollen and sharp; I bit it while eating a piece of overly crusty toast about 15 minutes ago, and the stinging irritation is currently the only thing keeping me grounded in this cavern. The physical discomfort is a perfect companion to the aesthetic betrayal.

I’ve spent the last 45 minutes staring at the ceiling, or where I assume the ceiling is. My friend Sophie K.-H., a voice stress analyst by trade and a skeptic by nature, warned me about this. She has this uncanny ability to hear the hairline fractures in a person’s confidence. When I told her about the paint choice, she didn’t even look at the swatches. She just listened to the way I said the word ‘daring.’ She told me later that my vocal pitch jumped about 25 hertz, a clear indicator that I was trying to sell myself on a lie. Sophie K.-H. knows that when we make these ‘bold’ choices, we are often just trying to perform a version of ourselves that is more interesting than we actually feel. We want to be the kind of person who can handle a room painted the color of a bruised plum. We want to be mysterious. But in the morning, when the caffeine hasn’t hit and you can’t find your left slipper, you don’t want mystery. You want the ability to see the furniture.

The Death of Photons

There is a specific kind of arrogance in thinking you can outsmart the sun. We buy these high-pigment, low-reflectance tins for 95 dollars a pop, believing that the laws of optics will bend to our will. But light is a fickle currency. In this room, the light doesn’t bounce; it dies. It hits the ‘Eternal Trench’ and simply ceases to exist. I feel like I owe the sun an apology for what I’ve done to its photons. It’s a classic case of designing for the image rather than the experience. We live in the experience, but we curate for the image. The gap between those two things is where regret lives, usually at a temperature of about 65 degrees because dark rooms always feel colder than they actually are.

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The photograph is a lie we tell ourselves in three coats of matte finish.

About 5 days ago, I was convinced that this was a metamorphosis. I thought I was shedding my boring, ‘greige’ past. I told anyone who would listen that ‘neutral’ was a synonym for ‘cowardice.’ Now, looking at the way the shadow of the wardrobe bleeds into the wall until the entire corner of the room disappears, I realize that cowardice has its merits. Cowardice is being able to see where the wall ends and the floor begins.

I’m currently contemplating the logistical nightmare of a reversal. To fix this, I’ll need at least 5 coats of high-hide primer. I’ll need to spend another 125 dollars on supplies. I’ll need to admit to Sophie K.-H. that she was right, which is arguably the most expensive part of the whole endeavor. It’s a humbling realization that my ‘manic design episode’ has essentially turned my sanctuary into a high-security prison cell.

The Statistical Reality of Darkness

I reached out to some professionals yesterday, just to see if there was a way to save the ‘mood’ without the ‘misery.’ The team at WellPainted actually laughed-sympathetically, of course-when I described my ‘Abyss’ situation. They told me they see this at least 15 times a month. People get caught up in the ‘Dark Academia’ trend or they watch one too many episodes of a home renovation show where the host talks about ‘enveloping spaces.’

The problem is that most of those spaces are 555 square feet with floor-to-ceiling windows and professional lighting rigs. My bedroom is a modest 145 square feet with one window that faces a brick wall. Putting dark blue in here wasn’t ‘moody.’ It was an accidental sensory deprivation experiment.

The voice stress analyst in Sophie K.-H. would have a field day with my current internal monologue. It’s a cacophony of ‘I told you so’ and ‘maybe it will look better in the spring.’ But spring is 5 months away. That’s 155 mornings of waking up in a tomb. I bit my tongue again just thinking about it. The sharp pain is a reminder that my environment is currently out of sync with my biological needs. Humans aren’t meant to live in the deep ocean. We aren’t bioluminescent. We need the bounce. We need the 75 percent light reflectance value that a soft white or a warm sand provides.

Cumulative Intensity

There’s a strange technicality to color that we ignore when we’re standing in the paint aisle. We look at a 2-inch square of color and think we can extrapolate that to 400 square feet of vertical surface area. It doesn’t work that way. Color is cumulative. It’s an exponential growth of intensity. That ‘charming navy’ on the card becomes a ‘soul-crushing obsidian’ when it’s surrounding you on all four sides.

It’s disconcerting to have your own home try to delete you.