The Best Times You’ll Have With Your College Roommate

You’ll help each other move things. You’ll haul heavy furniture up the stairs and accidentally drop parts and pieces; exhausted you’ll leave the coffee table on the porch and give the couch a final push to flop it over right side up before you collapse onto it, sweating, and crack open some beers. The coffee table will stay out there all night.

You’ll throw parties together — house parties, theme parties, impromptu dance parties. You’ll make dinner together and it’ll be an event, getting your schedules to synch up for one night a week, and it’ll always be something warm and comforting, like chicken tortilla soup or goulash or enchiladas. You’ll go grocery shopping together and split the bill; you’ll front them money when they need it without a thought because you know they’d do the same for you.

You’ll make a beer pong table out of milk crates and a door taken off its hinges; sometimes you’ll play wine pong or whiskey pong when you’ve run out of beer. You’ll play board games in the living room, go out for midnight walks when you’re both restless, you’ll consider getting a dog or cat or both and you’ll do it, or maybe you’ll just compromise and get a houseplant. You’ll take blurry pictures together and put them up on the fridge, ask each other’s opinions about what to wear for a first date or a night out. You’ll meet each other’s girlfriends, boyfriends, parents and one night stands; you’ll see all these people and discuss them in the kitchen the next day.

You’ll stay in and play Super Smash or watch 300 or Golden Girls reruns on a dim snowy weeknight with mugs of tea or Irish coffee or hot cocoa; you’ll pull at the blanket on opposite ends of the couch. You’ll sit with them on the deck, the steps, the roof, passing a 40 back and forth and not talking. You’ll sit there with them under the stars and somehow feel lightened, on the edge of the world with nowhere to go but up. You will have comfortable silence.

You’ll get high together and have conversations that change you, conversations that start small and last accidental hours. You’ll talk to them about things you can’t talk about with your significant other, not even your best friend; you don’t know why but somehow it’s different. You’ll talk about things you can only talk about with someone who’s close to you without being too close.

You’ll take care of each other after fights and debilitating break-ups. You’ll go to the bar with them on a random Tuesday because they’re sad and then you’ll carry each other home, laughing and stumbling the whole way, supporting each other though neither of you can really walk. You’ll lie on the couch together hungover, again on opposite ends, occasionally picking up your phones and alternately getting up for snacks or more Gatorade. Miserable but not alone.

You’ll be there for each other for things. You’ll drive each other to pharmacy, the hospital, the DMV; you’ll knock on their door to check if they’re dying of heartbreak or if they want grilled cheese. You’ll never feel completely alone because you’ll always have someone to talk to, if even for a brief exchange about the electric bill. You’ll feel content and supported knowing that, living in a rickety sh-thole where the oven works only sometimes and it’s 2000 degrees in the summer, with someone who is just as confused and clueless and young as you are, you’ve found a place to call home.