Dear Elevator Hallway,

I'll admit that I didn't like you at first. An older friend of mine who had already gone to college told me, "Leave your dorm door open! People walk by and you make a lot of friends that way." However, since there were only six rooms in this part of the dorms, and most of the time people coming in and out of the elevator were on a mission and didn't plan on stopping, not many people came past. Those who did just kind of awkwardly looked in instead of stopping. I felt as though you were stunting my social growth, and that frustrated me.

Some of the other girls in the hallway felt the same way, but eventually, they decided to embrace it. Your little open space in front of the elevator proved to be the perfect homework place, so a lot of the girls that lived around me ended up out there. When I finally joined them, I realized that being in the elevator hallway wouldn't be so bad after all. I found that it wasn't enough to just leave my door open - to make friends I needed to walk through it and see what it had in store. Soon, homework became card games, learning new names became silly nicknames, and awkward acquaintances became best friends.

At some point, you became more of a home to me than my own dorm. Offering little room for me to exist, let alone do anything else, my room served mainly as my sleeping place. When I needed to do homework, I packed up my book bag and shipped out into the hall. When I needed to call my dad to say goodnight, I sat directly outside our door. My accomplishments, my failures, my celebrations, and my stress - all are memories written on the walls of the hallway.

So Mary (the name we gave the elevator), I just wanted to say thank you for making my freshman year the fantastic thing that it was. I'll miss watching drunk people stumble out onto our floor on the weekends. Though I won't miss the boys bouncing their basketball above our heads until the wee hours of the morning, I will miss my friends' faces every time it happened. I thought you would ruin my chances to make any friends in college, but little did I know that without you, I would have missed out on the friendships I didn't know I needed. Thank you for the memories, the opportunities, and for being my freshman year home.

With love,

Jordan