Nostalgia.

Nostalgia for things that have not yet come to an end but will be missed dearly.

Nostalgia for things that, when remembered, will be spoken of fondly.

As freshman year comes to a close, it's difficult to feel any other emotion than this. For some, these final few weeks couldn't come any sooner, but for many, this milestone will also double as a goodbye; a goodbye to many things that became quintessential in our lives and made our first year of college everything that it was.

The smallest things can, and did, make or break our freshman year.

Like living in a dorm.

An all-girls dorm.

It's everything you would ever expect a building that laid down its foundation and sunk its roots into the hallowed hills of campus nearly 100 years ago.

It's beyond old.

Your mother lived here, as did your grandmother, and you know not much has changed since they graced these very halls.

The beds are creaky. With every move and motion you make while trying to go to sleep comes a sweeping fear that maybe, this time, the bed will actually break apart and fall into pieces beneath you.

There's usually someone crying, somewhere. Estrogen levels are high here. This was to be expected.

The showers are colder than ice. Every time you walk toward those communal bathroom doors clothed in your towel wrap, you take a deep breath and say a little prayer that maybe, just this once, a trickle of warm water will rain down on you from those godforsaken shower heads. Your prayer often goes unanswered.

Your air conditioning unit (yes, your dorm still sandwiches these within the windows of every single room in the building) never works, so it becomes a guessing game as to whether you're going to break a sweat by merely sitting in your room or if you'll need a parka and two blankets to make an attempt at maintaining some level of warmth.

Everything is falling apart and the appliances make noises they shouldn't and sometimes things smell weird and occasionally things flood and sometimes you find mold in weird places…

But this is home.

This the place where we have, by some lucky stroke, all experienced the first year of official independence together. This is the building in which a couple hundred girls, from all strokes of life and from all over the country, were thrown together in a random assortment and somehow forged a family. Girls from every sorority and house on campus all come together in one place.

This is the place we will miss most.

So, here's to the squeaky floors and closet doors.

Here's to the nervous hum the old elevator makes as it slowly makes its descent from the seventh to the first floor.

Here's to ladybugs crawling across your mirror in the morning and to finding little spiders spinning translucent webs in the nooks of your windowsill.

Here's to waking up to a bat fluttering its wings in the corner of your room at one o'clock in the morning and having to call animal control.

These unusual instances turned this building into a home. Moving out and saying goodbye to the souls I have met here, in this place, will be harder than it was to move in and say goodbye to my parents.

This is goodbye to laying bed and staying up until 4 a.m. talking about everything our tired brains could wrap themselves around.

This is goodbye to huddling together on an old blue couch around a bowl of popcorn to watch the season finale of The Bachelor.

This is goodbye to blasting “Blank Space" as loudly as you can from you room while you and the girls on your floor run around trying to get ready on a Friday night.

Goodbye to raiding each other's closest and never having to ask if it's okay to borrow something, because you know the answer is already yes.

Goodbye to the white paint stains littering the roof in the wake of cooler-painting season.

Goodbye to being able to walk three doors down to see your best friend.

Goodbye to this building, this all-girls dorm, that turned this college town into home.