Dear Roommate
June 11, 2017
Sam and I always go to bed at the same time.
Nights when I’m up late working, she’ll be in the room, online shopping or watching TV, until I come in. “Bed?” she’ll ask, and I’ll say, “Please.” Other times, I’ll make my way steadily through episodes of Friday Night Lights until she closes her computer, essay or PowerPoint finally complete. “Let’s sleep,” I’ll suggest, and we’ll commence our nightly routine: shifts at the sink, quiet music playing, the hum of our toothbrushes (both electric) filling the room.
I can’t pinpoint exactly when this began, but I can tell you that it’s not some weird, codependent ritual or rite (well, maybe it is). It’s more that we’ve settled into this easy way of living together that stems from our unnervingly peaceful roommateship. We coexist almost too well. We’ve never fought. We borrow each other’s clothes (although Sam being half a foot taller than I am makes it a bit difficult to find things that fit). We share a love of bread, good rap, emotionally damaged male TV characters, and Pirates of the Caribbean.
I hate waking up alone. I know she feels the same. It’s hard to fall asleep unless we’re both in bed, breathing in the unspoken comfort of someone else there to turn off the light.
It’s funny, because when I first met Sam, I was convinced we’d never be friends. Her offbeat sense of humor confused me, and I didn’t understand a lot about her; for example, she rode horses, which engendered in me a lot of “weird horse girl” stereotypes. She also struck me as a little crazy, falling into bed ridiculously late and pilfering traffic cones from frat house porches and never doing any of her homework. I was a morning person and relative rule-conformist; meanwhile, Sam was quirky, self-assured, loud—a girl who always told me, without shame, to “stop exercising so much” whenever I returned from a run.
I don’t know when I began to warm up to her. I regret not spending more time with her early on; my immediate impressions of her affected my actions, and I wish I hadn’t judged her so harshly (if at all). However, I understood from the beginning that we were well matched: our living styles were extremely compatible, mostly because neither of us cared much about what the other did, as long as we respected each other’s space, spoke up about any issues we might have, and kept the room sort of clean. She wasn’t passive aggressive (my biggest pet peeve), and although disorganized, she was comfortable in her own space and in living away from home, which I admired. Little did I know she’d eventually become one of my best friends.
We click uncannily. We can communicate, in a single glance, an entire paragraph of emotion. Even without eye contact, we can sense what the other is feeling and react accordingly—a hand squeeze, a subtle nudge, a laugh. While we don’t spend much time engrossed in deep, meaningful conversation, we understand each other on a fundamental level. She’ll ask me a question and I’ll give an answer she already anticipated. Or I’ll say something snarky about an event or circumstance and she’ll breathe a sigh of relief: “Good, I was thinking the same thing, but I didn’t want to be rude.” I am unafraid to speak my mind with her. We have reached a level of physical, personal, and emotional comfort that I never thought I could attain with anyone.
We’re also incredibly different. At six foot one, slender, and blonde, she is the antithesis to my five-seven, Korean self. I rise early and love to run; she abhors aerobic exercise, sleeps late, and knows more about dogs than any single person I’ve met. I’m a perfectionist in everything from my homework to my diet, while she orders pizza at 11 p.m. and finishes her research papers mere hours before they are due. She is much nicer than I am, patient and smiling with people I’d rather not give the time of day. Sam is the indecisive to my stubborn, the concise to my verbose, the laid-back to my type A. Yet somehow, we complement each other perfectly.
We stay up til three in the morning talking about our lives. We hold hands and call each other “wife.” We dance on tables and become unreasonably excited when we run into each other at parties. We link arms and go to dinner at 5pm in our sweatpants (Sam) and Birkenstocks (me), stacking our plates with pasta and melon and eating with our hands. Some of my best memories are of lying in our separate beds, easy silence between us. Then Sam will look up from her computer: “Can we buy an emu on Craigslist? Or a chameleon?” Or I’ll be watching Planet Earth and reacting verbally as I always do, and she’ll burst out laughing: “I need to record how ridiculous you sound.”
There are not many people with whom I’d spend two hours crafting a middle school throwback playlist. Who would hold me as I sobbed through sadness and frustration and heartbreak. Who would cry over the suffering of trees, the pure joy of a golden retriever puppy, the kettle corn and dried mango brought to her after a long day. Who looks up to her parents’ relationship, and laughs out loud at ancient Roman graffiti, and proudly advocates for pineapple on pizza.
We’ve been planning our birthday party recently. It speaks a lot to our personalities that our first idea was a couple’s spa day, quickly quashed by the superior “Wait, let’s play laser tag. And eat pizza. Yes. This is brilliant. Yes.” She is almost exactly a year older than me; I am turning nineteen on June 10, and she is twenty on June 11. This birthday realization may have been fate, but it honestly just makes sense; we are two of the most classic Geminis, in very different senses, that you will ever meet.
Sam always encourages me to write for this blog. She says it’s because she likes being featured on it, but I also know it’s because she is supportive, warmhearted, caring, and willing to give up anything for those she loves. I have many worries about next year, but our friendship is not one of them. This post, devoted to everything Sam that I love, is my gift to her.
Stanford asked me to write a 250-word letter to my roommate as part of my application. I ended that essay with the line: “I can’t wait for all our adventures together!” The cheesiness of that sentence cannot speak to the reality of this year. Given the opportunity to rewrite that supplement, I’d want to say just this: Sam, you beautiful, brilliant human being, I could not have asked for anyone better. Love you to pieces, dear.
Because say what you will, the Stanford housing department sure did a damn good job with us.
