I live in the same dorm my mom did in 1983, before she had to drop out because she got knocked up with me.

All the girls in my hall have dry erase boards stuck on their doors, complete with ugly hearts and trite sayings. I don’t like the boards. Their stark, empty whiteness. The horrible smell of dry erase markers. It’s like walking through a hospital, assaulted by fumes and seeing people’s lives scribbled on clipboards on the walls.

Post-It Notes fell out of favor with the college elite. They were sentenced to hapless terms as bookmarks and makeshift note cards. In the privacy of my room, I mourn their station in the world.

Long ago, before cell phones, the Internet and smelly markers, you knew who loved you by who left Post-It notes at your threshold. And though I never lived them, I long for my mom’s college days, when worth wasn’t measured by how many members of the football team you’d slept with or how many shots you could take without puking, but by how much of your ratty old door they couldn’t see.