These past few weeks have been a whirlwind for me. I finished my junior year of college (I know, sore subject, freaking out still), celebrated my 21^st birthday with more than a few toasts, went to the NCAA Division 3 Women’s Golf National Championship in Houston, TX to play in the tournament and represent my university, and I am leaving on Monday for Italy. Basically, that’s “me” speak for, "my bedroom at home is an absolute train wreck and I need an excuse or five." This is where I’m supposed to say something like "it’s really not that bad", or, "you should have seen my brothers’ room when he lived here." But I can’t even defend myself.

The only thing I can say, though, is that it is organized chaos. In one corner, I have a pile of stuff I need to make sure I pack for Italy. In another, I have a pile of stuff that I still have yet to organize from Houston. Next to my bed are, like, five bins of stuff I brought home from school but haven’t unpacked yet. There are birthday presents sitting by my nightstand still, and I have snorkeling equipment from my spring break trip to Mexico still in my window seat (why, you ask? I don’t know). Everything has a place (or a pile).

I think I can speak for most college students when I say that having a messy room comes with the territory. During the school year, we are only home for short periods of time, a weekend here, a weekend there, winter break, etc. We don’t have time to go through our closet and donate clothes we don’t wear anymore, or to actually fold the clothes we do wear so they all fit into our dressers. Summer is the one extended period of time we are home, and have the time we once longed for to re-organize our rooms, but we are so focused on so many other things, that we get off track. Suddenly, one jumbled up shirt becomes 10, and your once neatly-organized drawer that could hold 20 shirts, can now only hold those 10 balls of fabric. The chair you used to sit in to study or read, has now become a nice (and extremely expensive) table for you to store shoe boxes and blankets that you don’t know where to put otherwise. You decide that you’d always rather go to dinner with your cousin (and in my case, best friend), and spend the majority of your time together laughing, than stay in and try to organize the chaos in your room that is already fairly organized.

So basically, you’re probably assuming that right now, my life (and my room) is a mess. Well, that’s where you’re wrong. My heart is full, my smile is brighter than it has been in a long time, and my excitement for the coming summer is almost bursting out of me. I am home. I am happy! And I am perfectly content with my messy room.