A Room of My Own

I have been at university for a week now, and I still cannot quite believe it. For nineteen years, I shared a small bedroom with my two sisters. Now I have a room of my own on campus, with a desk, a narrow bed, and a window that looks out over the green.

The first night was the hardest. The room was too quiet. At home, I always fell asleep to the sound of my sisters breathing. Here, there was nothing. I lay awake and listened to strangers laughing in the corridor, and for the first time in my life, I felt completely alone.

But things have changed since then. On the second day, a girl from the room next door knocked and asked if I wanted to find the library together. We have eaten lunch together every day since. I have already met more new people in one week than I met in a whole year at school.

The work is harder than I expected. I have my first big assignment due on Friday, and a lecture every morning at nine. The accommodation is small and the food is not like my mother’s. Some nights, I miss home so much that it hurts.

And yet, when I sit at my own desk, under my own lamp, with my own books open in front of me, I feel something I have never felt before. I am becoming someone. In three years, I will graduate, and I will leave this little room behind. But I think I will remember it for the rest of my life — the room where my real life finally began.