There are so many things you do in college that are completely legal but somehow feel like you’re getting away with something. Maybe it’s because you’re living away from home for the first time, or because hostel life has its own strange set of rules that nobody ever actually explains. Either way, there are moments when you find yourself looking around for a security guard, even though you have done absolutely nothing wrong.
One of them is being in someone else’s hostel room for an unreasonable amount of time. You go over because you need a charger, notes, food, or maybe just five minutes of company. Then someone orders something, someone else comes in, you sit down, and suddenly it’s 2 a.m. You’ve been there for four hours and have no idea how. At some point, you start feeling like you should probably leave, not because anyone has asked you to, but because surely being in the same room for this long cannot be legal. The funniest part is that these rooms become second homes. You know which bed you can sit on, where the snacks are kept, whose blanket you can steal, and exactly who will complain if you stay too late. You go from being a visitor to practically another resident without anyone formally acknowledging when it happened.
Then there is cooking in the common room at 3 a.m. Nothing about making food is illegal., But try standing in a common room at three in the morning with a rice cooker, Maggi, eggs, and six people who should absolutely be sleeping. Suddenly it feels like an underground operation. Someone is watching the door while someone else is stirring noodles. The smell travels down the corridor, and everyone starts appearing one by one, pretending they just happened to be awake. There is always someone saying, “Guys, we really shouldn’t be doing this in public,” while continuing to eat. And honestly, the food tastes better because of it. Maybe it’s hunger. Maybe it’s the exhaustion. Or maybe everything tastes better when you know you’re supposed to be asleep.
Going to H&C the moment it opens at 5 a.m. is another experience that feels suspiciously illegal. You’ve been awake all night, your eyes hurt, your brain has stopped distinguishing between formulas and grocery lists, and suddenly it is time to go for breakfast. You walk there with your friends while the rest of campus is completely silent. The sky is barely getting light, everyone looks half-dead, and yet there is something ridiculously exciting about being outside at that hour. Then you order a chicken bread omelet and a lemon tea as though this is a completely normal thing to do at five in the morning. You sit around talking about absolutely nothing, laughing because you are too tired to behave normally, and for a little while the exam you were panicking about doesn’t seem quite so important.
What feels even more illegal is being awake at 9 a.m. after not having slept the previous night. Not awake in the sense of lying in bed questioning your decisions. Actually awake. Showered. Dressed. Sitting in class. Functioning, or at least convincingly pretending to. There is something deeply wrong about looking at the time and realizing you have been awake for more than twenty-four hours. Your friends look equally destroyed, but everyone keeps going because somehow the day still has things that need to happen. Someone will ask, “Did you sleep?” and you all just stare at each other because answering honestly would make the situation sound much worse.
The strangest part is that after a while, you become proud of these things. You start collecting them like evidence of having lived properly. You remember the night you never left someone’s room. You remember the Maggi made at 3 a.m. in the common room. You remember walking into H&C at 5 a.m. with the sky changing colour. You remember sitting through a 9 a.m. class with absolutely no sleep and somehow surviving it.
None of these things are particularly remarkable from the outside. They are not the moments you would put on a résumé or tell someone about at a formal dinner. But inside college, they become landmarks. They are the strange little experiences that make a place feel like yours.
Maybe that’s why they feel illegal. They happen outside the normal rhythm of life. They belong to hours when you’re supposed to be sleeping, spaces you’re not supposed to practically move into, and routines that make absolutely no sense to anyone who isn’t living them with you.
College gives you this strange kind of freedom. Not the dramatic kind. It’s not about suddenly being able to make every decision for yourself. It’s about realizing that the time you spent kissing your partner, in a semi-public place, isn’t something that can be judged. You have the freedom to publicly express your emotions, even if that’s in the form of physical affection. You can hug your friends, and kiss your partners, and that’s ok.
And eventually, those are the things you miss – not the lectures, not the deadlines, and certainly not the exams. The completely legal activities that somehow felt like little acts of rebellion. The rooms we never left. The food we cooked when we should have been sleeping. The sunrise breakfasts. The mornings we survived on nothing but caffeine, friendship, and an unreasonable amount of confidence. Because maybe college is partly about learning that freedom doesn’t always feel grand – sometimes, it just feels like being awake at 9 a.m. when you absolutely should not be.