Four walls, a ceiling, a floor, a window, a door.
These are the essentials of a room, any room.
But not my room.
My room is not any room, it is a metaphor, a meta-room, a mental room.
It has walls, and a floor, it has a window, a ceiling, but no door.
The walls have no colour, they are neither black nor white, they are a negative hue, they leach the colour out of life.
The floor is where I curl up in a ball, not wanting to go on, not wanting to go forward, not wanting to go back, locked in stasis; tied down with ropes, secured by terrible Gordian knots called panic, indecision and despair.
The window looks out onto the world, sometimes the blue sky, sometimes the grey city, but it allows nothing to look back through it to see me.
The ceiling is cruel, it knows my moods and soars featherlight far away when I try to climb the walls to escape my room; yet it will crush me with all its weight when I am left weak and helpless by my abortive attempt, pressing my fragile face into the unforgiving floor.
There is no door, no way out of my room, no way into my room; how did I become trapped in here?
The walls are stoutly constructed of  guilt, duty, failure, work, dreams (unfulfilled), desire, fear, anger, lust, ambition (crushed), loss, despair. They are cunningly designed and built by an architect who knows my few strengths and my many weaknesses, that architect is me.
The floor is the lowest point I can go, I can fall no further, I cannot dig a hole in which to hide myself, it is stronger than I am and totally unyielding in its merciless presence.
The window is the closest thing I have to a friend in my room. It, at least, lets me see beyond the stark walls, yet it is my warder, for it cannot be opened, cannot be broken open.
The ceiling watches me constantly, there is nowhere that I can escape its vigilance and the walls conspire with it so that there is no dark hiding place in my room.
Where is the door? Where is the entryway? Where is the exit?
I have sought the exit in the bottom of countless bottles, drinking down their contents like a fish of the sea. Amber, red, green, blue; it didn’t matter what pretty colour it might be, it didn’t help me. The wild freedom so dearly bought was an illusion, a slurring of the senses, so that I saw my room no more. When I awoke my room still cradled me within its suffocating bounds, and I could only roll my miserable self into a ball and shut my senses to its cruel gloating.
The doctors gave me a chemical key, guaranteed to set me free. For a time I no longer saw the walls, could not feel the weight of the ceiling, did not shrink into myself upon the hard, hard floor. I walked the streets with a smile on my face, free at last, free at last! The doctors smiled too as they declared me healed, and withdrew their key.
But I had forgotten that there is no door in my room. Their key had nothing to unlock. The synthetic soup had bathed my brain in balm and as the balm had drained away it left me stranded in my room once more.
The doctors passed me like some unclean rag to the psychologists so that they might flush out the dark recesses of my Id and set my Ego free. I sat in the chair and answered their questions until my mouth was dry and my tongue tangled. They were patient. They let me talk of my troubles, my life, my shame, my room. My room. Now they had a target, now they had a cause and they fired their reasoned arguments at my room, volley upon volley of logic. But my room paid them no heed, nor did the walls break under their barrage of logic. The ceiling laughed at their professional prognostication, that my room was not real, that it was just a construction of my mind. Those poor psychologists, they just couldn’t see that their consulting room was encompassed by my meta-room, and nothing inside my room would set me free.
My room still reigns supreme, no drug, no medicine, no logic can open a door that does not exist. The ceiling radiates brutal contentment, the floor gives me no comfort, the walls offer no hiding place, and the window…the bastard window taunts me still with its views of the world outside.

My room gloats. My room thinks it has won.

But I have devised a plan. Subtle, silent, secret.
Come closer, listen, while I whisper it in your ear.
For my room must not hear what I say.
I am going to make myself a world.
I will build it word by word.
There will not be enough room in my world for my room and me.
There will be just enough room for me.

What word shall I use as the foundation stone?

There, the choice is made, the first word laid.

That word is HOPE.