Desk

The Oxford Dictionary provides a loose definition of the word “desk”. It doesn’t necessarily need drawers. The surface doesn’t even need to be flat. Only its purpose remains.

I used to own just one desk—the one in my room. It followed me everywhere; bought in Korea where I was born, to California when I was nine years old, to New Haven at the start of junior year in high school. It was a piece of furniture where I did work, true to its purpose. Elementary school multiplication tables. Middle school English essays. High school chemistry lab reports.

Temporarily, during my first year at boarding school, my desk count increased to two: my dorm desk. With my change from a boarding to remote student status during COVID, and subsequently from a remote to day status after the move to New Haven, this desk only lasted for several months. And just 52 days ago, I obtained yet another dorm desk: this time, a university-grade rectangular piece of wood, equipped with a shallow keyboard pullout drawer.

My desk at home is older than I am, and it shows. The plastic is marked up with remnants of past art projects, with box cutter scratches, random graphite stains, and the widest array of colorful pen scratches. This is not to say that my desk is colorful. It’s a rather bland white, now even cream from over the years. The desk is not a rectangle, and instead has rounded edges and a curve inwards where one may sit and lean into. It’s flat. There’s a secondary desk underneath, complete with a set of drawers on the left. All in all, it fits into the Google definition—suited for work. And so are my two dorm desks peppered in my life. Those are both perfectly rectangular, but also complete with one or more drawers on its bottom and with a smooth, flat surface, ready for use.

My desks look like desks, but they are not desks.

Three-quarters of the time, they are too messy to perform its function. Notebooks, textbooks, writing utensils, random objects I picked up from a fair, a bag of Hot Cheetos, several rubber bands, a piece of string, some candy wrappers; there’s no bare surface to place a laptop. Instead, I head to my bed, or lean all the way back in my chair—my lap is now the desk, and the desk, a footrest. Socked or bare-footed, my desks always have room for two gently placed heels, resting for elevation.

In this realm of chaos, my desk is sometimes a wardrobe. My overflow of clothing spills out over a section of my bookshelf and my closet, and onto my bed, my chair, and lastly, my desk. Jackets and outerwear hang on the chair and clean laundry piles up on the flat surface. My Singapore t-shirt reading “Been there FINE there” with a bright red X over a person littering always seemed to laugh at my hypocrisy as I stacked clothes after clothes and junk after junk onto my desk. For days, it would stay in this pile of garments. Clothing acts as a cushion for my feet. I’d migrate even more frequently to my bed to work on projects.

I have the energy to organize my desk from time to time, mostly on Sunday nights at 2am, procrastinating the dreadful Monday to come. Once the state of tidiness is achieved, a moral conscience that I rarely realize I have nags me to keep it in this manner.

At my boarding school desk, I stole ten to fifteen tangerines from the dining hall every day and stored them in my room; I counted them one day, amounting to fifty-three circular balls of orange. On messy days, intact tangerines intermingled with peels and paper towels. On clean days, they were stacked neatly in a pyramid.

My desks are not special. But I had them.

During my high school junior winter, my room was not a safe haven. It was a battleground of work. A 20-minute drive from my school through the highway, I left for class at 7:30 am, barely having rubbed the sleepiness from my eyes; there, I would take naps during every block of free time, head to crew practice after school, attend club meetings, and finally make the long drive back. It was often past 9 pm when I arrived back home. I arrived at the sounds of my mom and my sister arguing, my mom crying on the phone, helpless with the ongoing divorce proceedings. Or I arrived at an empty house with everyone sleeping. I arrived to a cold kitchen, hungry after sports, having skipped dinner due to back-to-back meetings. I arrived at my room, where I would stay for a little more than ten hours—minus sleep, two to three hours working. The shorter time I spend with my desk, the less disorder there is; the wardrobe stays a wardrobe, and the desk a desk. Flying through reading assignments, essays, and problem sets, I took power naps every hour to revive my energy. The desk is then a bed, a military cot. Occasionally, I woke up to my 7 am alarm, my homework unfinished and my cheeks dented with lines from the hard surface.

I cry many times at my desks. Hands holding face. The desk is then a dependable therapist. Only it can hear and feel my tears.

I ate cup noodles over my desks on dozens of midnights. Last year, my desk was littered with chips, bags of sweets, crackers and chocolate. I downloaded Hollow Knight for fifteen dollars, the first time I spent money on a video game, and racked up a hundred hours over the span of December to April. The desk then became a witness.

My university dorm desk started empty on August 20, 2023, but it is now no different to its predecessors. Currently, a glass jar holding my Verdigris copper plate over a pool of vinegar stands at the edge. My lab notebook reading COMPOSITION (why is it screaming?) sits underneath a pile of graded problem sets and midterm papers. My snacks have relocated into a cabinet next to my desk, but my drawers are stuffed with Hi-Chew wrappers, and stray pencils have found a way into my makeup storage. A broken mirror lies in an awkward left-middle area. My laptop won’t fit; I sit back on my chair and elevate my sprained ankle onto the desk. It’s comfortable, even at the disheveled mess that it is. It simply works.

My desks look like desks, but they encompass so much more.