Shared Space
September 21st, 2025
Writer: Emmylou Ethan
Editor: Sophia Wohl
It’s interesting to think about the very few places in college that we can really call ours. The couch you do homework on in Thompson Library that’s a little too broken in by everyone who sat there before you. The table at Starbucks where morning debriefs happen, still scattered with crumbs from the last person who left in a rush. That patch of grass on the Oval you swear is “your spot,” even though twenty other people claim the same patch.
All of these spaces that we call ours aren't really ours at all. They're shared, stitched together to create a unique tapestry of our lives and others briefly overlapping.
There is something so truly special about a shared space. Sometimes it's as small as the instinctive act of sitting at the same table as someone to study. We don’t know their names, and they don’t know ours, yet in that moment we’ve both chosen to be there in each other’s presence. Maybe we don’t converse, but we coexist. In these spaces, boundaries blur, and personal moments become a faint background noise for someone else’s day, just as theirs become part of ours.
But sometimes, it doesn’t feel that simple. At a school of nearly sixty thousand students, it’s easy to feel like you’re just a statistic. Constantly surrounded by people, but not always sure of who's really by your side. College has a way of making you feel both part of something massive and somehow invisible at the same time.
That’s when shared space shows its quiet power. The upstairs neighbors playing their music a little too loudly, the uncontrollable laughter drifting in from the hallway, the dogs barking that becomes an uninvited alarm clock—all of it is living proof that life doesn’t pause for us. Even when we feel stuck in our heads, the world continues to turn, and we are reminded, sometimes annoyingly, sometimes comfortingly, that we are not alone.
There are so many moments throughout our day we think belong only to our story, yet at the same time, dozens of other stories are unfolding right under our nose. For me, living in a house with forty girls has been the clearest reminder of that truth. Everyone is moving at their own pace, running to class, giggling loudly in their shoebox of a room, or curled up studying in the living room into the late hours. Sometimes we pause on our way out to join a brief conversation about our days, but most of the time, we’re simply coexisting. And still, there’s a feeling of comfort in that coexistence. Because even when our lives don’t intertwine, they run parallel, and in that parallel, there is a connection that we all share. We are living proof that being together doesn’t always require a conversation or strong friendship. Sometimes, it’s enough just to share the space.
