my roommate sux and i love him

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    Before I moved in with C, I didn’t understand what it meant to live with someone. I’d had lots of roommates in college, even slept in the same room with strangers. But it’s different when it’s every day, when you want to sink into your home, and you’re deeply in love with your roommate.
    I want all the lights off, maybe a soft lamp. I want it cold, crank the AC down low. I want to hear only the sound of my own stuff: music, podcast, TV, movie. Use headphones if you want to listen to your shit. I want the sink perpetually empty, I swear to god, if you let the crusty dishes pile up again, I will lose my goddamn mind. I want the dirty laundry in the hamper, food wrappers in the garbage can, leftovers put safely away in the fridge the moment we’re done eating.
    Not you. You could give a shit about what goes where. You tell me I live in a cave, cool and dark, and then you turn on all the lights (even in the rooms we’re not in) and crank up the temperature so it feels like the (almost) no AC house you grew up in with Yankee parents.
    You told me once, when we were still in highschool, that you didn’t believe in soulmates. I got so mad hearing this from my soulmate. I get mad at you because we see the world differently. I love you because we see the world differently.
    I want to be like you. I wear your deodorant so I can smell your smell when I sweat. You get mad because that makes it run out faster, but I’ve offered to let you use mine.
    I spend whole days going to gardens with you, walking under the beating southern sun, listening to you tell me about the plants around us: the hydragengas, bottlebrush buckeyes, sarcococca, distylium, the many different oaks (and how they’re all different), the pines, the dogwoods, and of course the pitcher plants. Those are some of my best days, when you drive and I sleep and we play podcasts and stop for lunch. I get to pick the place because you picked the garden. Whole days, just for us.
    You make me cook dinner with you, tell you about my day when I’m too tired. I make you eat vegetarian food. You make me leave the apartment when I don’t want to. I make you come to Kroger with me and spend more time looking at cheese than you would in a million years on your own. You make me procrastinate. I try to make you come get coffee with me so we can do our work together; I’ll even buy the coffee even though I never offer to treat anywhere else. You make me calm down when I don’t want to. I make you care when you don’t want to, to just send the damn email already because it will make life easier if you ask for what you need.
    We push each other to our own sides of the bed, insistent that the other person is on  MY GODDAMN SIDE, YOU FUCKING ASSHOLE. We make each other better people because we are becoming the same person.

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