This term, I’ve had my dorm room to myself — technically a double, but temporarily mine alone. For the first two weeks, I didn’t touch my former roommate’s side. Her bed stayed bare, her desk remained clear and her walls, blank and pale, stretched out like silence across from me. I kept to my half, like I was waiting for someone to give me permission to inhabit more space. But the emptiness was tantalizing, daring me to cross the line. Slowly, my things began to drift — first a book, then a blanket and now a sprawl across every surface except the walls.
There’s a visual divide in the walls of the room now: one side a living collage of postcards, photos and taped-up memories; the other an unmarked, barren plain. When I stare too long at the blankness, it pulls me back through time, into the echo of bedrooms I only half-claimed, the condos of my childhood where nothing ever made it to the wall. It wasn’t because the spaces didn’t feel like mine, but because I never felt the need to leave any kind of permanent mark. I was always content to keep my presence muted, easily swept away. My clutter lived on the floor, in drawers, but never on the walls.
This room is different — this year is different. Now, if you look around, you’ll find postcards, old photos, a couple of dried flowers from a walk with a friend, pinned up beside a print of Monet’s "Water Lilies". Somehow, in between problem sets and growing up, I started to pin myself in place, leaving behind small bits of proof that I was there. It’s like I’ve started building a timeline of myself, one I can see and touch. In this room, there are blank walls and cluttered ones, and on these walls elementary school me lives alongside college me. Sometimes they bump shoulders. Sometimes they sit quietly together.
I turned twenty this past Sunday. My parents came up for the day, and for a few hours, time softened. With them, college me fades. I fold back into something smaller, something closer to home. At lunch, my mom pulled out her phone and started showing me old videos — me at three years old in a bucket hat, standing wide-eyed next to some aquarium exhibit, staring up at a penguin. “Penguins were your favorite,” she said. They still are. There are three stuffed ones on my dorm bed.
That night, I had a birthday party in my room. At one point, I was sitting in a chair while everyone else sat cross-legged on the floor, and I felt like I was back in kindergarten, waiting for story time. I looked over at my bookshelf — half full of textbooks and novels for class, half filled with childhood favorites. Another place where child and adult me sit side by side, peacefully coexisting.
On Sunday afternoon, I stood barefoot on my desk, hanging up a birthday banner, tape sticking to my fingers. I laugh now, thinking how far I’ve come from the girl who never put anything on her walls. I don’t hesitate now. Maybe I don’t always see sweeping signs of personal growth. But there are small ones. The kind of signs you hang, tape and tack up one by one.
This week in Mirror, we linger in memories made and step gently into those still forming. One writer visits the Post Mills Hot Air Balloon Festival. Another writes her fourth yearly letter to the sun. A third writer finds the best Earl Grey in Hanover. Finally, our two returning columnists give love advice to someone curious about dating apps.
There are long years ahead, full of major life changes, of choices that will shape me in ways I can’t yet imagine. I’ve moved on from the homes of my childhood, and soon, I’ll move on from this dorm room too. But when the time comes, I’ll gladly skip to the next space, posters in hand, ready to begin again.
