“This is ‘Slate Blue,’” my mom said, holding up one of many paint swatches to my bedroom wall.

“Oh, that’s my favorite,” I told her flatly.

“I thought ‘Lilac Tan’ was your favorite.”

At some point this year, my mom told me she was thinking of redecorating my bedroom. She probably told me over the phone while I was at school, walking to the library or painting my nails, the phone wedged between my ear and shoulder, half-listening, unprovoked.

“You’re sick of your yellow walls, right? I’m thinking of painting them a really faint blue. Almost a gray,” she probably said.

And I bet I said something along the lines of, “OK,” because I didn’t care.

Why should I care about something as trivial as the color of the walls of the bedroom I only sleep in a few times a year?

I’ve had friends whose parents completely transformed their bedrooms into home offices and glorified closets.

I’d always listen to them as they spilled their emotions on the table, asking “How could they do that?!” but I never took them seriously. It’s just a bedroom, I’d think to myself as I superficially sympathized with my distraught friends.

Over Easter break, though, I started to understand their side of the story.

I’ve been inexplicably homesick this entire semester, so a homeward-bound train ticket felt like a winning lottery ticket.

I love home, and this affinity has nothing to do with the new things I stumble upon every time I return: the flat screen TV, the shiny dishwasher, the luxuries my apartment lacks. If anything, these updates work against my attachment.

And over break, I realized the same goes for the paint on my walls.

Would a gray-blue color give my bedroom a more sophisticated edge? Yes. Would it be a huge improvement from my fifth grade self’s paint job? Obviously.

But when my room is redecorated, that yellow paint will be covered up with some new shade, and it won’t be mine anymore. I know I’m sounding melodramatic, but really, it won’t be my room.

And that’s a big deal, when something has “my” in front of it.

I realized all this while driving in my car over break. I remembered my best friend telling her younger sister, “That is my room. You just don’t get it,” in response to her sister’s attempt to take over her empty bedroom.

I saw daffodils and thought of the weeks and weeks of deliberations my mom, sister and I held before we decided on the perfect shade of yellow.

I remembered my mom holding up the paint swatches just a few months ago, but I couldn’t remember what they looked like.

I wondered how I’d gone so long without being upset by something so clearly upsetting: trading in my familiar bedroom for a paint color I can’t even describe.

As our year wraps up and we head home or move into new ones, we’ll have things to adjust to, from refinished bedrooms to new zip codes. We’ll have to update our ever-changing collections of things with “my” in front of them.

Toughest of all, we’ll have to force ourselves to accept changes we never wanted and walls painted “Slate Blue.” But, you know what? It’ll only make our remaining attachment stronger.