First-Year Pinboards: Making a Home Amidst the Mutable

The first time I entered my dorm room, wrenching my way through its name-engraved wooden doorframe, I felt like an intruder. The resistance of the door was nearly forty pounds, and I tottered through the threshold with four bags in my arms, two bulky, clattering suitcases, a small silver key clutched between my fingertips and a belly full of fear. Everywhere I looked, the mark of departed roommates — there were initials scraped white against wood, there were suspicious stains in the carpet, there were black scratches in the mirror and crumbs in the drawers. At that moment of intrusion, standing alone in my room, not yet my room, I felt a shivering itch to unpack. To take every bit of my life and shove it into drawers and on hangers, between bookshelves and under beds. To lay my life lovingly on my desk, to hang it up on my walls, to see that this space is capable of holding my life, and therefore can be mine. 

What most intimidated — and perhaps excited — me about the whole ritualistic unpacking adventure was the decoration of the pinboard. Purplish-red, rough, and spanning the entire length of my bed, the pinboard loomed angrily from its place on the wall. I say angrily partly due to its ruddy hue, but also because it was so starkly, so hugely empty. So, I endeavoured to fill its scratchy canvas to the best of my ability. Armed with a very flimsy collection of pins and Adrienne Lenker humming from my computer, I pinned up my first item: a portrait with my two closest friends. Lenker, admittedly, wasn’t the wisest musical choice, and I was briefly blinded by the shedding of some light (or rather, whale-like) tears. 

I finished the corner closest to my pillow first, picked and pinned it so that when I wake up and the sun fills my unwilling eyes, the first things I see are my best friend’s handwriting and the profile of my smiling senior cat. A wave of color swept across the red of the board as I built off of those initial items; baby portraits with my brother, eating green-green apples in the Romanian countryside; cherry blossoms flowering and falling at my old school; views through the window of my warm, sweet turpentine-smelling art studio on the second floor; the evergreen-carpeted Carpathians, the blue walls of my tennis club, the faces of parents, grandparents, cousins and friends so close I call them family; the faces of all the homes I’ve known. 

Photo by Sylvia Covaci

The last thing I pinned up with those thin-bladed, vexingly bendy pins was “Mutability” by Percy Blythe Shelley. Annotated from a beloved English class, I’d bracketed two lines: “Man’s yesterday may ne’er be like his morrow;/ Nought may endure but Mutability.” The poem spoke of change; the inevitability of mutation, nature’s random hand. Change brought me here, to a new ocean. But with the new, my pinboard reminds me that the old remains, too. Just because I have left a place or people doesn't mean they cease to exist; they are here, neatly pinned on my board, held and heard in my phone, and there, across the ocean. Granted, friends’ faces are a bit pixelated and their voices a tad choppy (I blame Eduroam), but we talk about all the same things and they exist just the same. For now, they make their home in my pinboard, making this newness hold my life a little easier. 

I think I am not alone in the first-year feeling of missing home. My advice to you is to grieve; listen to sad music and hang up your photographs, call your mom crying and call your friends smiling. But then go out of your grief and embrace mutability. Swim in the North Sea, walk the cobblestone of this town till you know every alley, make friends with neighbourhood cats and have hundreds of awkward introductory conversations. Invite people through your threshold, and let their newness populate your room with its new jokes and new accents, new stories and new smiles. And soon, that which is new will become home, and join the faces and places of your ever-crowding pinboard.