Dear new inhabitants of my dorm room,

The amount of memories made in your dorm room is extremely underrated. It may be small, it may be seemingly unreasonable and uncomfortable at first, and you may be able to walk across the room in 5 steps, but it is home. At first, it is strange being crammed into a small room with someone you may not know very well, in a building made up of a million other small rooms with more people you don’t know, but you will wind up calling it home. Not a dorm, not just your place of living, not the temporary roof over your head, but home. This room will remain your constant throughout the coming whirlwind of a year. This room has seen a range of emotions such as laughter, tears, anger, breakdowns, and excitement. It has seen a range of people such as a roommate, new friends, old friends visiting, family, significant others, and some people that you don’t even know who they were.

Sure, this room had its flaws. It was the source of some noise complaints from laughing too loud, The floor has probably been hard to find once or twice, both beds have been fallen off of and left a mess, the closet torn through, and some funky smells emitted from forgotten food left in the mini fridge. The room has seen it all, and the memories are endless. It saddens me that it has all been wiped clean for your arrival. You won’t know the two girls who lived there before you (unless we come banging on your door to see what you’ve done with it). You won’t know the familiar hazelnut coffee scent mixed with sprayed perfume that filled the air. You won’t know that our lovely neighbors played their xbox so loud it shook one of the walls. You won’t know that we thought the room had a black hole because we could never find anything. You won’t know that there used to be a dent in the wall from dancing too hard. You won’t know any of this because it has been set to a clean slate, ready for move-in. You will move in to this room probably complaining about how small it is, just as we did. Yes, it’s small and it’s not what you’re used to, but it won’t change when everything else is. It will be your solace after a rough day, your library, your kitchen, your hangout spot, your pregame place, your napping place, and most importantly it will be your home.

Soon you will be the ones peeling your pictures and decorations of the walls, emptying your closets and drawers, and packing up the room so that two other people can make it their own. So, whoever next inhabits my dorm room, have some love towards it. I may have only spent a year in it, but part of me was left in that dorm room back in May. Soon, you will understand the importance of “the dorm room experience”.