Talking with my parents felt like a breath of fresh air

Seeing my room key felt out of place

At one point during the aforementioned conversation with my parents in the family room, I looked down to see my room key in one hand, my lanyard wrapped around my fingers. I've seen this key and this lanyard in my hand countless times every day for the past two months, but seeing them while sitting on my couch, rather than my dorm room desk chair or a bench on The Oval, felt like a glitch in the system.

Texting my college friends while sitting in my childhood bedroom was an intense case of worlds colliding

Before I moved to college, every memory I'd had of texting friends from my bed had been organizing plans for homecoming or scheduling a trip to the mall with my best friends from high school. Tonight, texting the girls on my floor, who, before this moment, I had only ever communicated with on campus, had me beyond shook. It felt like I had somehow time-traveled and I was back in high school, seeing a vision of my future college friends playing out on my phone screen.

If I want to get food at midnight I have to be careful not to wake my parents

I got extremely used to being out and about in the middle of the night at college; my tendency to start film projects the day before they were due led to lots of late-night editing sessions in Hopkins Hall, which were usually accompanied by late-night trips to Blaze or UDF. After dinner tonight, I was contemplating whether I'd want to get some ice cream in a few hours- then realized that in order to do that, I'd have to resort to my old high school ways of slowly creeping down the stairs and tiptoeing across the kitchen floor so as not to disturb my parents asleep upstairs.

My bedroom is so...quiet

Anyone who lives in a residence hall knows it's never completely silent- from doors slamming shut in the hallway to random people blasting music outside, from the weird sounds coming from your fridge to the weird sounds coming from your radiator, there is never a dull moment for your ears. But I never realized quite how noisy it was in my dorm room until I was in my bedroom at home again. No slamming, no blasting, no weird sounds. It was just really, really, really quiet (not that I'm complaining).