1.At midnight, lie in bed and binge YouTube. Take your earphones out and bask in the glory of watching BuzzFeed on full volume.
1.Designate a shelf space as the shoe rack, then scatter your shoes by the door. No one will trip or trample on your white shoes. The other shoe in the pair will never foray under a roommate’s desk to collect hair and unswept common room dust.
1.Dibs on the best desk.
1.Slide said desk beside the window and feel smug about your unchallenged design expertise. Sit at your desk and look pensively out the window. The precarious University-provided rocking chair is balanced artfully at the front tip, as if you’re about to produce a marvelous thing, a masterpiece, a magnum opus, a Blackboard post, etc.
1.Rant about the University housing system. Punchlines include, and All. Housing. Costs. The. Same!
2. Congratulate yourself for essentially winning the housing lottery. Transmit silent brainwaves of condolences to the freshmen in your previous room.
3. Cackle too loudly over an embarrassingly lame cat video, and suffer a guilt complex for days over the invisible wrath of your silent neighbor.
4. Jump at seeing said silent neighbor(s) in the bathroom. A human being is a rare sight, says your inner homebody. Oh god, says the guilt complex, I’m sorry.
5. Spot your ex-roommates on campus. Remember their erratic sleep patterns, what they looked like in the mornings. The sounds of their alarms. They’ll ask, how’s the single? You say, great…
6. …for the most part. It’s been nice coming home to an empty room after a full day. You don’t say:
7. It’s lonely. Feeling the door shut behind your suitcases on move-in day and hearing nothing. Setting up the room, alone, the only company found in photographs, the only conversation found in songs, which you played again, and again, and again to keep you going. Tonight, it is just you, the trees, anonymous whispers from behind closed doors, and this want to say something, a good night for now, maybe, or tomorrow’s good morning. But you know how it goes.
8. Say nothing.
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