When I’m at a party or a nice dinner out, all I think about is going home. Don’t get me wrong, I love my friends and partying and dinners out. I think I just love my sofa the most.
My mother used to warn me about the evils of social media, that “comparison kills joy” and “scrolling is bad for mental health.” She’s probably right. No, she is definitely right. But there are some redeeming qualities amidst the horrors of doom-scrolling and noticing all the parties you weren’t invited to. I, for one, met my college roommates on Instagram.
I posted on one of those awkward “find-your-roommate” Instagram pages. For hours after, my stomach felt sick with the weight of being perceived by hundreds. When I look back on that post, I realize I was vulnerable. It was vulnerable to admit to an Instagram page and its followers that I knew nobody in the state I was moving to, had no one to room with, and absolutely zero plans. It felt like screaming into the void: “I don’t know what I’m doing.”
Regardless, two people responded. Their direct messages looked me in the face and shouted the same thing back: I’m vulnerable too.
Cut forward past some crummy frat parties and a smattering of life-altering situationships; now we’re sophomores. We have an apartment together with a cat who likes to sit on the window ledge and look out introspectively. Sometimes we think he knows something we don’t. If he could speak, would he tell us?
It’s not a big apartment; just under 1,000 square feet to house three girls and a kitten. We sit in the living area (which I can’t call a “living room” because it’s not even its own room) almost all the time. I wait at the front door for them to come home like a wounded animal or a wife with a husband shipped out to war.
When they do get home, we sit on the couch. It’s not much, just one piece of a sectional because that’s all we could fit in our restricting floor plan. My roommate’s mom spent hours if not days of her summer reupholstering it, replacing the springs. It took a lot of work. We don’t have the heart to tell her that the couch is falling apart. When we sit on it, the cushions fall off and our body weight sinks into the cracks in between. There’s a hole between the cushion and the wooden framing on the left side under which a small treasure trove of lost belongings hide. Sometimes, when something too valuable to lose falls in the mysterious hole — which we’ve lovingly dubbed “the crack” — we have to bring out our tongs and go on a rescue mission.
We sit on the couch and talk for hours about nothing and everything. We take turns showing each other live performances on YouTube that changed our lives. We sit in silence with our textbooks open and highlighters uncapped. We put three drops of “Ancient Wisdom” into our oil diffuser and laugh at the scented oil’s obscure name. We talk about new music we like and how most philosophical conundrums can be solved with a girl’s perspective. “Schrödinger’s cat is just a guy discovering things exist outside his perception.” We all laugh. I used to think I liked to talk to hear my own voice. I think now I realize I just like to be listened to.
My love of my roommates is one of the most fulfilling loves I’ve ever known. I am reminded daily that love isn’t always just romantic or familial — that there is something beautiful in that gray-area between family and partners: the platonic.
So we’re sitting on our broken sofa — and we can’t stay in one spot for too long or else the cushions begin to fall off. We’re sitting on the broken sofa and I think of the hours of work my roommate’s mother put into refurbishing the couch for us. I can feel a mother’s love for her child when I sit on the couch. I feel how the love of every woman I’ve ever known radiates from the cushions straight into my bones.