Everything was very still and very quiet inside Southgate room 423. I knocked on the door and timidly inched my way in, and the noise in the dormitory became muffled in the background as I closed it behind me. I was the first one to arrive. The beds and desks were bare, the floor was clean, the closets were empty. The only sign that someone had, in fact, lived there before my two roommates and me was a collection of glow-in-the-dark stars stuck to the ceiling. I stared up at the plastic stars, trying to picture the old occupants who had chosen to place them there. I imagined them giggling as they came to the decision: “Yes, glow-in-the-dark stars for the room, let’s go buy them at Target!” One of the girls would have had to stand on the chair or the bed, stretching to reach the ceiling as she glued them on one by one, her friends laughing excitedly from the ground. My roommates and I, I thought, we’ll do something quirky and college-y like that too.
It wasn’t long before my parents came in with The Stuff. Never a light packer, I had boxes upon boxes—as well as bags, various sized plastic containers, suitcases and anything else that could carry it. It took several trips across the jungle of parents, feet, mini fridges and intimidating-looking sophomores to actually get everything in the room. By that time, my roommates had arrived, and we began the process of sizing each other up, each hoping the other two would be “normal.”
I have very few memories of unpacking because I spent those next couple of hours of move-in day in a daze. Instead of making myself useful, I stood by my bed and stared at my things as they were taken out and put away. That dress, the blue one, that was the dress I wore at my high school’s homecoming last year. That alarm clock sat in my old room, that pair of flips-flops was lost under my old bed for a week, that’s the mug I drank from every morning. And there, on an unfamiliar bed, was my darling teddy bear—college life was not enough to convince me to part from her.
At the risk of sounding extremely materialistic, my stuff, all those things being taken out of boxes and given new places, it was a part of me. Or at least, a part of high school-me. And I while I didn’t object to my mother’s opinion on the best spot to place the bathrobe, I still thought, no, not on that shelf. It goes in my closet at home, in my room, hanging on the hook of the left door, not in a
college dorm.
There was of course, new stuff. Extra-large Bed Bath and Beyond and Target bags were just as cumbersome as the suitcases and boxes from home in room 423. All this new stuff, well, I wasn’t quite sure what to think about it. I had
no memories of falling asleep curled
under my new pink and green comforter, no feelings about the multiple new containers and desk organizers that I had chosen. This new set of things was a blank slate. And yet, my parents were putting the new Stuff away along with the old. I wasn’t really much help, since I was too busy internally panicking. New and old were living together harmoniously already.
It all ended rather abruptly. One second the suitcase was full, the next I could see the bottom and there was only one T-shirt left to put away. Now that those confusing, overwhelming hours of unpacking were over, I didn’t know what to do with myself. What was there left to do? I poked my head into the hallway and saw that it had turned into a graveyard of cardboard, plastic and discarded tape. Some girls—wide-eyed, hesitant, slightly sweaty—had started to make their way across the trash in the quest to socialize. Still too dazed to join them, I retreated back into the room.
College had officially begun. I didn’t fully believe it, but I did have physical evidence. I had the indisputable facts of a new mattress topper and unopened bottles of shampoo. My parents had left. I could touch the fabric of my clothes in the strange new setting of my dorm room. I felt the weight of my room key in my hand as I sat on my new chair. Now that I was alone, everything in the room went back to being the way it was before I came in: very still and very quiet, perched on the brink of the next four years.
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