Cut Up Strawberry Tops

When I was young, I imagined roommates to be minor annoyances or otherwise friends and lovers you had move in. A few roommates later, I know a roommate can be any or all of those things, but she will always be more to me. 

We have nothing in common and chances are down the road our relationship will probably end up existing as merely a string of lunches catching up- that common affection still very real, the connection still there, but the relationship defined by 2 parts nostalgia and 1 part communion. I will always care for her. Though we may get separated, it will always matter to me that she is happy and healthy and that other people see that absorbing warmth and reckless abandon in her eyes that night Arcade Fire bellowed in to the mountains. Wherever I am, her dirty dishes and bits of cut up strawberry tops will be tones of home. 

Ad when she is distant or when I used to just miss her coming or leaving home, she was still very much a part of my life. She was still more than a roommate. She struggles with who she is and who she can never stop being and yet is so effortlessly, intuitively and intimately comfortable in her own skin. I know her persona as if it were an extension of my own.I know what will keep her up at night, her fears, what makes her laugh and what joys she radiated throughout our home once. I know her favorite snacks and those that she would eat in public, which are indeed different things. 

I know the security in seeing her keys on the keyrack whether I'd seen her in the days since they've been there or not. I know what she wants when she is sick and hungover and I know that I adore her even loud, drunk, and self destructive. I love her for her free spirit which is limited only by her crippling idealism. Every contradiction, shortcoming, moody phase and every bit of her which will always be too cool for her surroundings exist as a beautiful, complex chaos in my eyes- twisting around me like the eye of a hurricane because somehow, she put me there and she kept me there. 

I will always want her here, but she belongs elsewhere. She is easier to admire than love, but she was my roommate. She was my roommate and our physical space we shared will always reflect the place in my heart I had for her which she never left.  

She will always be in my kitchen laughing in what always appeared to be a brand-new bathrobe laughing like nothing could ever be so funny. She is more these things than she could ever be anything else to me. A thousand little jokes and instances made up our home and relationship, and it was tough to separate the two for a while. It still is here and there, in a glimpse of her marks on the chalkboards which bled through like happy shadows. Much can be said against her as a friend and roommate, but I could never say. She wasn't everything, but she was home. That, some days, is everything.