A hostel room looks temporary until you begin leaving pieces of yourself inside it. At first, it feels borrowed- a bed that isn’t yours, a desk that has known other hands, shelves waiting to be claimed. But slowly, without your permission or even your notice, the room begins to archive you. It starts collecting evidence, of who you were when you arrived, and of who you became while staying. And sometimes, the things that hold those stories are not grand or sentimental at all. Sometimes they are empty cans, a rice cooker, a lighter you never use.
Take the empty Monster cans that sit in corners of my room like tiny silver markers of time. I buy one at the airport at the start of every trimester, always before I return to campus, as if beginning a new academic season requires ritual. They feel almost ceremonial. Each one remembers an arrival- coming back with an overfull suitcase, and the delusional optimism that this trimester I will somehow be organized. They are little monuments to beginnings. To all the times I left one home to return to another.
There is also a bowl on my shelf that, objectively, should not matter this much. But it is the bowl I use whenever the dining hall offers Chocos and milk for breakfast, and every time I carry it to the mess, fill it, and eat with the absurd seriousness reserved for childhood comforts, I am reminded that joy can be embarrassingly simple.
Then there is the comforter, though calling it mine feels inaccurate. It belongs to everyone. It is where people crawl under when they need to crash out- emotionally, physically, academically. Friends disappear beneath it after breakdowns, after overthinking spirals, after endterm nights that stretch too far. It has held whispered confessions, collective anxiety, and the kind of silence that only happens between people who no longer need to explain themselves. It’s less bedding, and more shelter.
In my drawer sits a light green lighter a friend gave me. I rarely use it, because I like it more as a reminder than as an object. It holds his presence in a strange, quiet way. Some gifts are practical. Some are symbolic. This one is both. It reminds me that sometimes people leave traces in your life through the smallest things- a casual object that somehow carries disproportionate emotional weight.
Then there is the suitcase, perpetually full of food. Snacks I purchase in impossible quantities. Things meant to last weeks that vanish in days because, somehow, food in a hostel becomes collective property. The suitcase is not really luggage anymore. It’s merely a container for edible affection.
But perhaps the most precious thing in my room is the caricature of me and three of my closest people- a drawing that should, by all practical measures, be just paper and ink, but feels much heavier than that. It sits there quietly, almost unassuming, while holding entire emotional landscapes.
What I love most is that it captures us in our natural habitats, not posed into some artificial idea of friendship. I’m drawn exactly as I often am- half-absorbed, scrolling on my phone. My senior looks slightly dazed, beautifully elsewhere, as if he has just emerged from a thought too large to explain. The campus father figure and the girl my mother calls are turned toward each other, joking around in the way they always do, carrying that easy, familiar banter that makes people feel like they’ve known each other forever.
And somehow, that’s what makes it feel so true. It doesn’t romanticize us- it just sees us.
The senior’s presence in it makes me soft every time I look at it. What began with him helping me fill one Pyret cheat sheet somehow turned into one of the gentlest, most important relationships in my life. He has a way of making ordinary days feel lighter, of understanding me in silences, of making care feel effortless. There is a kind of love in being known by someone who notices your moods before your words. In having someone whose presence steadies you without trying. He feels, in so many quiet ways, like home inside a person.
Then there are the empty cans covering my study table, which I keep meaning to turn into ashtrays for people. Even my clutter is relational. Even trash in this room imagines hospitality. And maybe that is what these objects reveal. That things absorb people. That ordinary items can become emotional archives. That a room holds memories.
One day, I will leave this place for the last time. I will pack the cans, the lighter, the bowl, the caricature, the glass ball. To anyone else, they will look like random belongings. But I will know they are not random, because they are proof that I was here, that people loved me here. That I built a life in borrowed space, and when I pack them, I will not be packing objects. I will be packing my home.