Round Three

There are two weeks left before you are done with the semester. Everything is coming down to due dates and deadlines but somehow only Spider Solitaire is commanding enough to inspire any sort of willingness in execution. It is a struggle to write paper after paper, to try and complete one take home exam after another, to reread chapters from months ago. You are more than ready to throw in the alleged towel, but know you will not able to get through intergalactic travel or existence without it (or that stupid degree you are working for).

But all Douglas Adams references aside, you are finding yourself, though unmotivated, coming to a pleasant understanding and acceptance of how you have started to really live your life. You are contemplative with enough sense to not become overwhelmed by past and present mistakes.

It is raining, which you love. But such downpour is not without reminders of things you’ve left behind and things you are without.

You come home with thoughts and preponderance of Hume, whom you’ve been studying in one of your philosophy classes. He is an old love, from courses taken and books read long ago. Causation and nostalgia compel you to recollection— and thoughts of shattered glass lead to thoughts of wrecking balls. Your phone rings and why, speak of the devil.. But you are no longer taking phone calls from angry ex-boyfriends so you do not pick up.

Instead you call over dear friends for an execution of good times before the next two weeks of hell. There are papers to be written, but tonight you chose to embrace the glory of your apartment and the people you’ve come to love and stay in without obligation to work.

There has been a semester’s worth of parties, and there is no need for another tonight. Rather, the ones who are compelled just as much by conversation than keg stands come over and things seem to matter more.

The living room is suddenly full. You smoke a joint and listen to Simon and Garfunkel covering Bob Dylan on vinyl. You smoke your cigarettes and make your love. You drink your wine and you are happy.

You talk about your generation of codependents, how we are all compelled to be in relationships for fear of being alone, but base them on no real grounds of legitimacy, and therefore find ourselves dissatisfied. We move to cheating, instead of merely breaking up with those who do not fulfill us because, again, we’re so damn terrified of spending the night alone. Your friends are the contributing kind. You converse and take it all in. You are learning more and more of what there is to be taken from choosing carefully the ones you invite in. Platonically and otherwise.

They are understanding of the romantic disasters of the semester that you’ve endured. These are the people who are forgiving when you get caught up and do not call for weeks at a time because you are busy indulging in maljudgement with boys they warned you about. These are the ones who will always return to the apartment, to your home and to your heart, even when you are not always returning calls.

You realize you want this for your apartment always. Three years feels like a waste when you end a relationship. And coming into your own apartment right after that feels a lot like tabula fucking rasa. But it soon becomes a playground for bad ideas and trying to get over things way too fast. Single for the first time in years with your own apartment, as you learned this semester, inspires many trials and many errors. But you remind yourself that it is not who’s sleeping in your bed that really matters, but who’s sitting in your living room, listening to record players and making you feel.

Five Things that Make You Question Why You Ever Agreed to Living with a Boy

1. When you first started integrating your lives in preparation for the shared living arrangement, there was the introduction of friends not made together—an untapped source of potential everything. And oh how flattering when his friends all think you are a thing to be worshiped, how delightful when your best friends leave a bonfire with great impressions.

Fast forward through a semester of friends, lovers, and lapses in judgment and the potential is slightly less prevalent. Though Roommate is the sole member of the (heterosexual) opposite sex with whom your interactions are strictly platonic, submitting to ego boosts and consequently exercising poor choices with his best friend (a few times) has rendered you in a rather awkward position since he has decided to move up here for spring semester.

You first noticed slight shifts in behavior after a few.. ”morning-afters,” in which attempted intimacy was far more than you’d generally appreciate or expect after that many drinks, but it was not until the best friend put his cell phone charger in your bedroom upon arrival for a weekend visit that you realized the severity of the situation. You quickly make it clear that he is here to visit his best friend and not some potential girlfriend. You have roommate tell him the same. Then, best friend gets drunk and tells you he loves you (and, of course, the quotes you pick out from Palahniuk books). Hah. You call him a train wreck and tell him to sleep on the couch. He doesn’t. (To be fair, you are also drunk and slightly flattered, though repulsed in the morning.)

Roommate did not feel it necessary to inform you of that darling tendency of his dear friend to quickly discard all notions of the term “casual.” He said he’s never seen him this way but to you it sounds like excuses, excuses.

2. He refused for a while to put down the toilet seat, claiming that it was gravitationally easier for you to put it down than for him to put it up.

3. He is good-looking but slightly inept, and therefore consistently coming to you for clarification and advice regarding your gender. When inebriated, he has been known to take your suggestions not as such, but rather literally. It’s slightly precious and slightly pathetic, but for the most part inconsequential to your relative existence.

However, when, in an exercise of said ineptitude, he decidedly chose to sleep with a friend of a (shared) friend with whom he had formerly exchanged fluids with for nearly a semester, you were thrown into a whirlwind of he-said, she-said bullshit in which you truly came to question why you are living with someone with the emotional and mental maturity, and more so sexual understanding of an amoeba.

Love triangles become love octagons when everybody is talking to everybody and the boy you live with is a dipshit. God love him. But really.

4. He and his friends, upon seeing 300, decidedly attempted for the entire semester to get Gatsby to respond to “Spartan.”

5. The incestuality of dating among the same pools of friends and subsequent love interests of the people you live with is far too little advised against. You learned (the hard way, of course) that it is unwise to set up the person(s) you cohabitate with with the friends of those with whom you are moderately romantically affiliated. It is not ideal for the boy you are seeing to text your roommate when you don’t immediately respond. It is even less ideal to get texts from the girl roommate is seeing regarding her insecurities and bitterness towards his incompetencies. You find yourself a conduit for jr. high romance at 2am more than once. You feel like a translator of idiocy. You are forced to tell them it is not your issue and that you are done. The next morning the one you are wasting your time on brings it all up again. It begins to feel like an endless cycle.