It is awkward walking down the hall of a dormitory now, in socked feet — it offers flashes back to freshmen year. I have always walked heavily… the kind of walk where your heel makes a bass impact with the floor that you can feel subtly through the walls. It’s imitative, i think, of my mother, and the way her footfalls would telegraph her movement throughout our old house. I would know when to flinch or feign sleep from the way her heels fell on our creaking wooden stairs, and from how the opaque glass pane in my window softly shook in its frame.

Socks on the carpeted-over tile of the dorm is different… there is no reverberation, no rattles, no hints of anyone else’s movement. It is strangely silent.