There’s no feeling quite like knocking on your friend’s dorm room at the end of the year, knowing you’ll never again have to see someone walk bare-footed towards the communal bathroom because next semester they’ll be off campus.

There’s a new feeling of freedom: no more 10 p.m. quiet hours or hiding alcohol from RDs. No more constantly running into members of your old freshman friend group, who followed college tradition and split up. 

At first, it seems like an upgrade. More space, fewer rules and no more getting written up for having a candle. But then you visit your friend for the first time, and you realize: they are no longer confined to a single dorm room and neither are the others.

There are many different genres of people you may encounter before reaching your friend. 

First, there are the ones who treat the living spaces like a personal storage unit. It’s worse when they’re climbers, and you’re navigating over Patagonia packs decked with carabiners and avoiding eye contact with the jar of homemade kombucha that looks like a prop from a Frankenstein remake. 

Then there are the housemates’ guests — including the honorary housemate who lingers like a stray cat. That awkward silence when they pop in, and you realize that you too have become a stray — nibbling at their food between classes, stirring pasta longer than necessary to avoid eye contact with them.

And then there’s an entirely different kind of horror: you visit another house, and it’s just… silent. Not because the house is empty — people are definitely there. They’ve just stopped their conversations mid-sentence and are staring at you like you’ve walked in on a group of Minecraft villagers.

Of course, there’s the occasional day when a housemate’s situationship visits, and everyone starts whispering about him. The tension is palpable, but you have no idea why. You sit there, waiting for your friend to fill you in, or for time travel to be invented so you can go back to the dorms — well, maybe not the dorms themselves — but at least the doors that kept the people you didn’t interact with behind closed ones.