When I first walked into my Duchesne dorm room, it smelled like someone else’s laundry. Its prison-like walls were marked scratches that promised a story, and so did the dented door. I had inherited just half of it for a year. But I pretended like it had been mine all along.
The bulletin boards on my walls were decked out with mementos, pictures, and posters of all my favorite things. Everything I hung up was less about decoration and more about self-preservation—proof that I existed before coming to Boston College. I bought my preferred cereal and the same detergent we use at home to drown my senses in the familiar. Like a successful conqueror hoisting a flag, I laid claim to my little shoebox of a room.
I faked my way through the rest of my everyday life as well. I scouted the buildings I had class on Google Maps the day before, taking a good look at each building so it appeared like I knew where to go. On the first day of class, I even walked some of my new friends to their classrooms, like a seasoned tour guide. I’d talk to people I’d met exactly once as if we’d known each other forever. And the best part is, they replied just as enthusiastically.
That’s the comforting thing about college—everyone else is also pretending, like little kids playing house. We traded nods and nervous laughs, building trust out of our mutual uncertainty. The freshman experience is unique in that way. In what other scenario are you forced to live surrounded by strangers? And yet, there’s an unspoken pact that we wouldn’t call out the cracks in each other’s confidence.
Somehow, mimicking certainty together created more bonding than honesty ever could have in those first few weeks. The girls I met would pretend together, sending pictures through a nameless group chat of the outfits we’d wear for a night out.
When we first discovered the O’Neill study rooms, we would pour in and out, even sitting on the floor when no chairs were available. We didn’t know each other, and there were plenty of chairs outside, but we all pretended we’d been doing this forever. Like many things this year, we forged friendships from shared culture and forced proximity.
Life flowed with an undercurrent of “just go with it.” Slowly, but surely, the game of pretend started to feel real. We were still improvising, but now we knew each other’s rhythms. When we walked out of our first midterm, all of my classmates huddled in a circle and started sharing answers, complaints, and hopes. Even if our grades were dubious, that moment felt like a success. Our struggles were real, our camaraderie was real, and our shared experience was anything but pretend.
The other day, my friends and I tried to recall the origins of our relationships, and we all agreed, “It just kinda happened.” Because eventually, we stopped pretending. Friends of circumstance slowly creeped their way onto the “Favorites” list of my contacts, and our singular, unnamed group chat evolved into six distinct ones, each titled by a different inside joke. The fearful, formal emails to teachers became second nature, and at some point or another, I memorized the bus schedule.
Getting off one of those 2:55 p.m. buses, I walk through Newton Campus with the sun just starting to dip west. Birds are chirping, girls are tanning on the grass, and flowers are in full bloom. As I take it all in, it feels like I’m walking through a memory saturated in nostalgia for a year that’s gone by too fast. I make it to my room, and my fingers habitually punch in the code. Lying down my schoolbag, I can take a look at the matchbox that became my home away from home.
The walls that housed someone else’s stories now housed my own. The desk is lined with my everyday things, the wooden furniture hides scratches and stains that weren’t there before, and each corner holds a memory.
I cannot pinpoint the moment my dorm became the place where I could take my hair down and sigh in relief, but I now know that a sense of belonging often comes quietly.
Through repetition and shared awkwardness, tiny acts of pretending, over time, became real. The space didn’t change. I did. The end of freshman year makes me harbor a bittersweet feeling. Because even though I’m leaving this little room behind, I’m carrying everything it gave me: courage, unexpected friendships, and the quiet confidence that I can build a home wherever I go.
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