Cozy

It's not like I hate my room here. I've just always been completely indifferent to it since I've come to college. It's a fairly nice box to live in, it's clean and has everything I need. But at the end of the day, it's just a box. The walls have been recently painted a non-offensive color, but they're underneath they're still just cement. The carpet is pretty new and clean, but it's ugly brown and orange. My windows are nice and big, but curtains are forbidden, squashing the simple womanly pleasure of picking out a fabric. The imaginary cutrains would be a nice, soft yellow, I've decided, to compensate for the lack of sunlight in Erie. Then I would hang white Christmas lights behind the curtain, and in the winter when it gets dark at 5:00, I would have a bright, twinkling window.

But this morning, halfway through my article, I had to run out to the union building to buy some milk for my coffee. It was gray and rainy and cold out, sincerely cold, not just chilly. When I got back to my warm, bright room, jazz music was pouring out of my speakers, and I could smell my freshly brewed coffee from the door. The New York Times was open on my bed, and there was a half-finished article waiting to be written on my laptop.

I sat down at my desk, turned down my music a little bit. I poured my coffee and stirred in a tiny bit of milk. I opened up my Beacon noteboook and settled in to write some 500 words in an hour. And I comfortably realized that I could be happy doing this every morning for the rest of my life.

So for the first time, alone in the little box of my room, I almost felt like I had come home.