Room tour

Welcome! Sorry the elevator took so long — it tends to do that. You can take your shoes off by the door. 

One of my favorite things about this room is the window straight ahead. Since the whole space is shaped like a long hallway, the afternoon sun really floods in — over my desk chair especially, which is a great midday study pick-me-up.

As you walk in, you’ll see an open closet to your left. Folded on open hanging shelves, I have sweatshirts and dance clothes placed within easy reach in case I need to change quickly in the middle of the day. On the long rack above the hanging clothes, I have boxes for laundry items, spare folded towels, winter clothes, a picnic blanket and a travel pillow for my long flights back home. Right across from the closet, by the door, is a standing mirror. I resisted getting a mirror until junior year. Though it wasn’t expensive, it always seemed somewhat unnecessary. But I caved last year, and I’m so glad I did. I hadn’t realized how often I’d left the house assuming I looked a mess just because I hadn’t had the ability to check. Now, it’s good to have peace of mind.

As we continue down the hall that is my room, we find ourselves at a set of two low plastic drawers. I’ve had these since freshman year. I’ve always used them to keep snacks from home, which I’ve slowly brought less and less of (as I’ve learned that home won’t disappear if I don’t try to pack every bit of it up with me). Miscellaneous keepsakes like cards from friends, old paintings and empty canvases, and past editions of The News-Letter also populate those drawers. And boring stuff like vitamins and essential oils.

On top of the first drawer, I have quite a hefty mug collection for a college student (but really you should see my mug stash at home). I have a “Happy to be Here” mug from my apartment, a “K” mug from a cousin, the requisite and iconic Lighting of the Quads and Christmas Village memorabilia, and a small black “Button Poetry” mug.

On the second shelf, there’s a printer! My lovely, lovely Computer Science friends, who have witnessed my Writing Seminars struggle to print pages before classes for the past three years, bought me one for my 21st birthday. It was the absolute best gift and the biggest surprise. Rested against the plastic drawers are a yoga mat, wheel and a couple of bands. When I’m back home, my mom and I go to her wonderful yoga instructor together several times a week. I try to do what I can before classes or before bed. Moving can be such a good mental reset and a welcome way of cracking my back after hours on an unforgiving seat.

Right by the big window is my desk, populated by too many half-filled notebooks, writing craft books and two metal containers of stationery. There are, more often than not, several mugs of different liquids on various coasters around my desk. I try not to be, but I sadly do become, as my favorite author V.E. Schwab has coined in her newsletter, a “drinks goblin” when I am getting work done.

Stacked in the upright paper compartment of one of my metal stationery containers is a thick pile of old copies of The New Yorker, which I gratefully adopted from a small library in Provincetown that was giving them away while on a roadtrip with a great friend; I then proceeded to haul them around in my overstuffed duffle bag for the next four days of our trip by train (but it was most definitely worth the shoulder ache). There’s also a small print of an inlet at sunset, old architecture around the dock glowing with dewy light, that reminds me of a favorite spot at home: the lotus garden.

Now, my beloved window: I have my favorite books standing to one end of the sill, bookended by a stone sculpture of an owl that my mom bought during a work trip to Greece when she was in her 20s. On the other end, there’s a ceramic bowl my mom threw (pottery threw, not baseball threw). In it, I’ve placed a bundle of white fabric flowers that light up (or will, whenever I remember to buy replacement batteries). This window has two parts, so on the thick frame that juts out, halving it, I’ve placed two prints: a painted lighthouse in Delaware, gifted to me back when my roadtrip buddy was my freshman year roommate, and a watercolor of the Amalfi coast from my study abroad in Rome two summers ago. At the very center, I’ve hung a dream catcher that commemorates my dog, my furry sister, who passed just this summer.

To the right of my window sits a small bookshelf that I’ve had since freshman year. It has grown in density significantly, and I worry often about how I’m going to carry it all away. Every time any organization or event has ever handed out a free sticker, I’ve stuck it along this same panel of my bookshelf. Now it has everything: a First Year Seminar sticker, dozens of TEDx and APTT stickers, my photo pass for that one time I had media access to a concert at the Fillmore and a “25 Year Celebration” sticker from the National Book Festival in DC that my amazing friend and I went to this past month.

Tucked in a nook beside the bookshelf sits my bed, complete with a throw and a reading lamp stuck to the far corner of the wall. And on the pillar that juts slightly out from the wall at the foot of my bed, I’ve put up a little card that I found on a beach trip back home with my mom: It’s a Paulo Coelho quote that reads, “One is loved because one is loved. No reason is needed for loving.”

I used to worry that I’d leave myself behind at home or here in Baltimore — that I’d split my life between these two places so that neither would ever feel complete — but I think the opposite has happened. Somehow, even with a move to a new campus-adjacent apartment every year, both places have become part of me, and both have become home. Maybe it’s as simple as Coelho says. A place, any place and many places can feel like home simply because they do. No reason is needed.

Kaitlin Tan is a senior from Manila, Philippines majoring in Writing Seminars and Cognitive Science. She is the Voices Editor for The News-Letter.