Goodbye, Dorm!

I've been seeing a lot of articles recently talking about "Saying goodbye to your freshman year dorm." With flowery prose they all seem to say the same "Moving in was scary but eventually, you became my home" and somehow, I feel a disconnect with these articles. So I'm writing my own.

The place smells, sometimes by fault of myself and my roommate, mostly by fault of whatever jackass is making fish sticks at three in the morning, and always thanks to the potheads we live with.

Most of the time there's music playing that's far too loud at all hours of the night. While the mattress is hard and lumpy, it is at the very least longer than my mattress back home, providing my feet a place to rest without my head hitting the wall behind me.

People have thrown up on this room—drunken, sober, doesn't make much difference. A man once threw ice cream at our walls while screaming about his girlfriend. (He was one of the drunk ones)

Has it "become home?" Yeah, sure, in the sense that everywhere becomes home if you sleep there regularly. But I feel little attachment to it.

"Oh, Dorm Room, so many memories were made here that will last a lifetime."

I slept and ate here. My memories were made elsewhere, thank God.

I don't have a tapestry, maybe that's why. All the pictures in these articles would indicate that if I'd had a tapestry and a tin ampersand with light bulbs in it I would have developed a better connection with this room. I don't have that. I've got a camera, and a canister of instant coffee, and a MacBook, and my clothes. When I leave they go with me and end up in my room for the summer, and the next guy moves in here and sleeps in my bed, and the next guy after him. That's how this works.

"Oh, but your friends!"

No.

We didn't become like sisters...well...brothers, by living together. (All these articles are from a distinctly female perspective; maybe that's why I don't relate well.) We're friends. I'd be friends with them regardless. Dorm had nothing to do with that, in fact it probably hurt more than anything.

"The days spent in your dorm room will be the days you tell stories about one day." God, I hope not.

1) I hope I have more interesting stories, and 2) some of the stuff that's happened in here I'd be more than happy to take to my grave.

My dorm has become to me some sort of uncomfortable part of my life. I don't identify with it, I sure as hell don't wear the custom 701 hats my roommates had fabricated. One day I'll look back and say "Oh, yeah, look at that stuff that happened. Pretty neat." But, I won't want to come back here. No.

So for the next few months, home will be home. Then Riverview Dorm Number 403 will be home, after that maybe an apartment will be home, then another series of apartments will be home, eventually maybe a house with a white picket fence will be home, or the back of a campervan will be home, or a hut in Peru, or a flat in Paris, or a cabin in Minnesota, or a tent on my back. It doesn't matter.

Don't identify with place. Identify with yourself, with your art, with your research, with what you know and what you love and what you learn, but not with where you live. Any number of things can force you out of where you live, but nobody can take those other things from you.

So, to Riverview 701, thanks for letting me crash here for a while, it's been real cool, man.