"Roommates"...A Vignette

The thing I love about New York is that everywhere you look there's love, and luxury, and everything in between. 

Sometimes just luxury. 

Sometimes just love. 

And sometimes there’s a little bit of both, each winking shyly at the other, and me, on the street corner, gaping, wondering how any two people could be lucky enough to possess the right person and enough money to make all their worries disappear? 

That winter, I certainly didn’t have luxury. 

I lived with three roommates in a cozy little apartment in Crown Heights. 

The rent was split unevenly four ways, depending on which of us had a larger bedroom. 

“Cozy” more describes the closeness that flourished between my roommates and I, and less the actual space in the apartment. 

We were all friends in college, and as we graduated and moved into new parts of our lives, we decided having each other around was something that should stay the same. 

I loved our home—built on the shared love of four girls from very different families and home states, different styles and beliefs. Somehow it all worked well together. 

We took turns in the kitchen, wiping the counters down between uses. 

And at night we’d decide on movies or TV shows to watch together. The rare mornings we could spend all together were lit by the sunlight that peeked in through the stretching windows in the living room.            It cast winking prisms on the floor. 

The smell and sound of brewing espresso punctuated any silence that happened to linger between our bursts of laughter and conversation. 

Loving my roommates was a dance.

A careful balancing between friend and family, an understanding of where our intimacy could begin and end. When you spend that much time with someone, you fall under the illusion that you know just about everything there is to know about them. 

Sometimes it’s a hard lesson to learn that you don’t. 

Although there wasn’t much material luxury that drizzly February, there was love.