The Lemon Life | online magazine offering a fresh perspective on post-grad life.

Words by: Virginia Manning

Image by: Janek Lowe

Running from the metro to avoid the rain, I arrived at my front door after what felt like an endless week at work. Leaving the downpour behind me, my apartment was quiet and warm. It was solace to come home and see my roommate, but on that particular day, she was not there. I checked the messages and found that she had phoned, which struck me as unusual because we had never called one another beyond the occasional reminder call to pick up toilet paper or dish soap. We almost always interacted in person. As I dialed her number I recalled the last time I had actually seen her. It had been over a week. Apart from the odd hello as one of us was leaving as the other came home, we had not seen or spoken to one another for more than a few moments in several months.

Our opposing schedules meant when I finally went to bed, she was off to the studio to continue the projects for her fine arts degree. Weekends consisted of me traveling with work or seeing my boyfriend for once, and she would tirelessly work for the feminism and spoken word events in and around the city. When I reached her on the phone, she gave me the news: she was moving out at the end of the month. She had noticed the divergence in our schedules, and we were fast becoming anonymous roommates. Our fun student lifestyle had come to an end, and she opted for a change. I wanted to protest, but I agreed because it was true that it no longer felt like we lived together.

My roommate, also known fondly as my hetero-life partner, moved in three years ago. I was planting flowers in the little garden in front of my house when I saw her walking past with her mother. I watched them argue over an apartment they had visited. She wanted it, but her mother did not like it.  Because I needed a roommate for the upcoming school year I chased them down and invited them in to see my spare room. Looking no further than the living room, her mother handed me a cheque, and I had a new roommate. Five weeks later she moved in and we respectively started our school terms. Two years of university and two roommate nightmare stories behind me, I had hit the jackpot. She was cool, funny, and we got along perfectly. We were friends almost immediately. As time went on, she became my best friend, and we consistently laughed, cooked and never fought. She always made me giggle by doing things like eating yogurt with a wooden spoon when no other clean ones were available, and she left me funny notes on the kitchen counter describing her endless stories, including a date when, over coffee, “the guy casually told me he was married”. I loved coming home to her stories. When school and then later, my job became stressful, she made our house a warm and safe place where I could escape. If all else failed, I could always retreat to a comfortable home and a good friend.

When we were both students, our parallelism made our living space work well. With matching schedules, we could stay up all night studying and then justify sleeping in and wearing sweats all day. Our bursaries and loans meant budgeting and weeks of mac and cheese at a time, and we joked about raiding the grocery store one day—a well-planned heist that would result in us eating and drinking all of the chocolate, wine and seafood we could steal. We had fun, but it was destabilized when my situation changed; I graduated and took a job. Whereas my roommate kept staying up late studying, I would go to bed, and when I woke up and left the house in the early morning, she was still asleep. I traveled for work and was often gone weekends and by the time I arrived home, it was late or she was out. The slightest, nearly imperceptible tension began to rise as my income afforded me a more relaxed attitude towards the utilities bill, and I watched longingly as she partied anytime she wanted. It had taken us almost a year to notice it, but we no longer saw one another. Once addressed, it was a surprise—a total shock to admit that something so great was over.

The student lifestyle is not compatible with the working lifestyle, and I tried to ignore that for as long as I could. Until she decided to move out, I had casually thought we might live together forever. I wrongly assumed that nothing could change, and as I looked around at my friends, it appeared that we had all found ourselves in similar situations. Some moved in with partners, others decided to live alone, and some moved to other cities. The days of university roommates were over. In the most adult action of my life, I made plans for my boyfriend to move in, and tearfully watched as my roommate packed her boxes and finally handed me her keys.

We are friends and we always will be, but we reached the limits of student living. It occurred to me that there is an endpoint to living with a friend, and with no animosity, she moved to another house and I started a different life with my partner. The graduate and student living situation, like an undergraduate degree, are ephemeral: the days with my university roommate are over, and like school, it is a very fond memory.

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