To the new tenants of my beloved former apartment:

There’s nothing more personal and intimate to anyone than their own living arrangement. Most early 20-year-olds will find an apartment or a house near their work or school and just end up using the place as a simple crash pad, never actually embracing the housing that they occupy in order to make it an actual home.

You’ve been left with an absolute gem. It’s not because the apartment has an elevator to move things up into the place, not because you have underground parking, and not because you have a community hot tub. No, it’s none of those things. This is the apartment that has a knack for creating memories and making people’s mood turn from bad to great.

This is the apartment my friends would come over to enjoy lazy Sundays doing nothing but watching football while avoiding as many responsibilities that we could.

Sure the carpet is nice, it’s 100% nice enough for my friend Courtney to constantly come over to nap on without any regrets. I’ll always see that spot on the floor as Courtney’s spot. We had four couches in the giant living room, but she always preferred the floor. I’ll never know why.

I also left you the most wonderful couch that any college kid could ever have. An overstuffed and oversized sectional that barely fit into the apartment the way it is. I was willing to chop the thing in half if it meant that was the only way it would get in there.

The couch that my friend Andrew used to come over and take a nap on after working overnights at the hotel down the street. He would come over for eight hours and only say six words before falling asleep, waking up, and heading home.

He now lives in Boston, and it crushed me to leave that couch for you, but I’m hoping it’ll help you make more memories like I was fortunate enough to make. Looking at that couch made me miss him every time I looked at the old beat-up sectional.

The kitchen that made plenty of meals, mostly ones from frozen bags because of Ashton’s inability to cook anything without needing fumigation from the burnt stench of food he struggled to simply heat up. It was okay though, it provided us with a week’s worth of jokes and laughter.

But that kitchen not only was a place for quick meals but the place where I,, along with five of my friends, belted Vanessa Carlton’s song “A Thousand Miles” at the top of our lungs during a full day of binge drinking after finals.

Many people talk about how things break their hearts. I feel this is a bit cliché and far overused, but when it comes to being able to go home, it legitimately crushes my spirit that I’m no longer going home to that apartment. I no longer get excited to go home and bask in the memories that were the perfect life that existed when all of my friends lived within a three-mile radius of me.

Zach no longer plays video games while I sleep on the futon before we would go and camp out in the tent at 5:30 in the morning for hockey games. Josh no longer can come over and play the retro Star Wars Battlefront on PlayStation 2 with me.

Your new apartment is meant for entertaining. You’re going to have a lot of friendships built in the upcoming years during college, and plenty of them are going to involve the very same spaces that my memories will coexist.

Enjoy the memories and the happiness that will go along with all of them. I promise you, the time will go by quickly, you’ll look forward to being home, and you’ll absolutely feel blessed by the place you’re able to call home.