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“How could drops of water know themselves to form a river? Yet the river flows on.”

-Antoine de Saint-Exupery

            In comparison to the Kenny-Baker-sized dorms of my high school friends, my room is positively enormous (almost Peter-Mayhew-sized, for those keeping tabs): miles of forested carpets forcefully pushing past fake, freezing tundras of marble tiles, framing an enormous space which, for the time being, is filled only with my blaringly white tennis shoes and terraced laundry baskets.

            It’s wonderful, ample space for my daily dances to the pop music emanating from the iPod plugged into an out-of-place, Art Deco lamp, enough room for my sprawl of text books and labeled spirals to claw their way from underneath my narrow new bed.

            The only problem that I have with the room, with all its ample shelving space and overhanging closet pantries, is the cold, ever-echoing water drip heralding from the serrated shower ceiling. Every five seconds, a single (and rather dirty) drop of buildup, of condensing plumbing faucetry, falls to my shower floor. And, as it pools into an unavoidable puddle, it waits, it waits for me to forget about it, it waits for me to step in it.

            But that is not the worst part, far from it. The sound, the crash after it hits the cold porcelain floor, is terrible, bouncing along the walls of my room, especially, it seems, between the hours of midnight and eight o’clock in the morning, creating an annoying rhythm of drum rolls, destroying the silence of the late evening, disrupting my sleep.

            And, while I’m sleeping, in my dreams, there is an even beat consistently plodding through every bit of blurry dreamscape, setting the tempo for the night’s activities, preparing me for the shower of the next morning’s schedule.