It was the spring of 2022. I was a second-semester senior at a small arts high school in San Francisco. Life was good. I knew where I was going to college—all I had to do was pass my classes, and before I knew it, I’d be in Providence. It still felt surreal, no matter how many times I said it. It had been just that fall that I started to hold my breath every time I drove through a tunnel, wishing to get into a good college. A school like Brown had been only a dream back then.

Sometime that spring, I received an email from my soon-to-be undergraduate institution saying that I had to fill out a form about my living habits to be paired with a roommate. As an only child, the thought of living with another person my age was daunting. What if she touched my stuff? What if she chewed too loudly? What if she hated my music taste?

Inaction wasn’t an option, so I opened the form and immediately began lying. Rather than filling it out truthfully, I answered as the Indigo I wished I was and hoped to become upon arrival at Brown. Of course I got up early! (I hate waking up early.) Of course I was asleep by midnight! (Being in bed before one is a rarity for me despite my attempts to become a morning person.) Of course I was neat! (I seldom have a single inch of free desk space due to completely avoidable clutter.)

There was one question, though, that made me hesitate: “How close do you want to be with your roommate?” I remember the three options: stranger, acquaintance, and best friend. Deep down, the third option was my dream: The only child yearned for the sister she’d never had. But my 18-year-old self reasoned that anyone who chose the best friend option was probably weird and clingy, so I carefully selected “acquaintance” and moved on with my life.

When I received my roommate assignment a few months later, I immediately went to Instagram to find her, only to discover that she had messaged me first. DMing her revealed very little—she was studying environmental science, or maybe anthropology, and was from a suburb outside of New York that I had never heard of. She was bringing a mirror; I was bringing an espresso machine. I had signed up for the 11 a.m. move-in slot; she’d be arriving at 1 p.m. Such logistics were the substance of our early conversations—I won’t bore you with more details.

When we finally met, it was relatively anticlimactic. She seemed just as normal as she had been via DM. If you had told me during that first week that she would become one of my closest friends at Brown, I wouldn’t have been shocked, but I wouldn’t have expected it either.

At the time, she and I were part of a second-floor Keeney friend group. During O-Week and the first few weeks of the semester, upperclassmen constantly told us that our friend group wouldn’t last. Who actually stays friends with their orientation friend group? Well, you’re looking at her (or, rather, reading her creative nonfiction). Three years later, the original O-Week crew is sharing a house in Fox Point. Every single one of us is a completely different person than we were in James-Mead, mostly for the better.

However, the relationship I have with S is different from my other apartment building mates. I first understood that what we have is distinct when I referred to her as a “friend” during one of those freshman-year parties that seemed so important to us then, and found that the word felt strange in my mouth. I corrected myself and said “roommate” instead. I liked the word—it implied the intimacy that comes with seeing someone snooze through five alarms, or call their mom, or get ready for a date. To this day, even though we live in separate bedrooms on opposite sides of our apartment, I still call her my roommate, despite no longer living in the same room.

I knew that we would be close after the first time we intentionally hung out together. No one else from our friend group was there, and it wasn’t a casual chat after we’d both just gotten back from our afternoon classes. No, this was an official S and Indigo Hang. I remember the exact moment I realized we’d be friends for life, as silly as it was. We were both trying to find a YouTube video to watch, and my recommended page had a thumbnail of a turtle eating a strawberry. Immediately, we both saw it and said in unison, “That one.”

We made many memories that year. We bought a small patch of astroturf and put it outside our front door, surrounding it with a mini white fence and calling it our front lawn until ResLife told us to clean up the fire hazard. We tried to make slime with shampoo. We adopted a gecko from Petco who we named Fish. We saw weird movies at Providence Place. She gave me colds. I gave her colds. It was perfect.

When it came time to pick sophomore housing, we applied for a double together. We got lucky and were able to almost perfectly recreate the second floor of James-Mead, except in Wayland. That year, S and I bought a denim bean bag and named it the Jean Jag. We continued raising our gecko together. A houseplant joined our family.

That summer, after two years of living together, we graduated from a double and moved into a summer sublet in Providence. She was staying to work in her lab, while I had received a humanities fellowship to basically just read. Our gecko came with us, though the seniors we were subletting from didn’t have to know that.

It was that summer that we started doing Day Debrief. That is, whenever one of us got home, we would find the other and explain each and every thing that had happened to us that day. I don’t know when or why we started doing it, but once we started, we couldn’t stop. I had to know about her day in excruciating detail, and vice versa. What did she eat for lunch? What building was her appointment in? Which café had she gone to on a whim? Whenever anything interesting happened to me that summer, I would immediately think about how I was going to describe it to her‚ the details I’d emphasize, the points I’d try to make.

Day Debrief became such a crucial part of our relationship that it is legitimately baffling to imagine who we would be without it. We took Day Debrief with us into our junior year, into a downright palatial Minden double. We pushed our beds against the same wall to be closer to one another. We continued raising Fish to be a nice young man. We Day Debriefed every day, no matter how busy we were.

Until that week in the spring of our junior year, when we stopped talking because of a conflict. It was a complex situation in which neither one of us was in the wrong, and we both wanted to forgive each other. At one point, I broke the silence to say that I wasn’t going to friend group hangouts out of respect for her right to see them amidst our falling-out.

“But I just miss you,” she said and started crying. I left our room, also crying. I remember seeing people walking on Thayer and wanting to stop them and tell them what was happening. How could they just act like everything was normal when S and I weren’t speaking? 

At that time, we had no idea how long the conflict would last. We both cried to our third suitemate. We both cried by ourselves. We both wrote and deleted texts to the other. It was a complex disagreement in which neither person wanted to hurt the other but had—deeply. Eventually, through tough conversations, we limped toward forgiveness.

After that week, I never took Day Debrief for granted again. That spring, we had a friendship vow renewal in the backyard of the Classics building, inviting all our friends, but telling no one about the torturous week that had prompted it. Only our long-suffering suitemate knew why we had invited our friend group to a fake wedding for seemingly no reason. Some things are better left in Minden.

The summer flew by, and now it’s senior year. For the first time in our college careers, we have our own rooms. Regardless, Day Debrief continues—usually in her room, occasionally in mine.

Day Debrief is everything to me: It’s the light at the end of the tunnel during a tough day, a guaranteed second opinion on a problem I'm having, a listening ear when I want to rave about a muffin I ate or a flower I saw or literally anything at all. When I stay late at the Rock and miss Day Debrief, it takes me longer to fall asleep. Like I said, roommate, not friend.

Once, in Minden, S and I were watching Twin Peaks, and we accidentally hit the same pose. We were on our sides, facing one another, our arms curled to our chests in the exact same way. We called the pose “the Gemini.” Months later, on spring break, we were sharing a bed and we both woke up in the middle of the night only to find that we were in the same Gemini position. We went back to sleep. Like I said, roommate, not friend.

During my freshman year, I spent three months dating a man simply because he had a septum and long hair, even though he made me deeply unhappy. (In “Goodbye to All That,” Joan Didion writes, “Was anyone ever so young? I am here to tell you that someone was.”) Most people around me were so excited that I wasn’t single that they didn’t see how dissatisfied I was, leading me to stay in the relationship for longer than I should have because the social validation felt so good. 

It was S—only S—who said anything. While we were doing homework together one afternoon, she said, completely unprompted, “You have a sadness about you, indi.mud.” (She often calls me by my Instagram handle.) I had known implicitly that things needed to end, but S’s comments were the final push I needed to break up with him. While others expressed sadness that I was single again, S reacted positively, as if she could see the weight lifted from my chest. Like I said, roommate, not friend.

Once, when S and I were talking in front of our friend, she suddenly started laughing at us. “What is it?” I asked, genuinely curious.

“It’s like you guys have a secret language or something,” she said. Like I said, roommate, not friend. 

As I get ready to graduate in a few months, a big part of me feels ready to leave. I’ve been lucky at Brown—I discovered what I am passionate about and pursued it. I built beautiful mentoring relationships with my professors and other capital-a Adults. I fell in love here and am still in love with that person two and a half years later.

But I also feel ready to go. This is the same school where my classmates were arrested, where I was raped, and where two students died senselessly last fall. The campus holds all those memories for me, and my body feels ready to live somewhere else for a while.

When people ask me if I’m going to miss Brown, I answer with an emphatic no. I always make the disclaimer that I’ll miss certain people, but that I’ve seen what I needed to see, and that I’m ready to go. If you’ve ever asked me that and I’ve said that to you, allow me to apologize for lying through my teeth. I’ll never be ready to not do Day Debrief. I’ll never be ready to not live in the same town as my Gemini. I’ll never be ready to say goodbye to S, but we’ll have to. Inevitably, there will be a last day and a last Day Debrief. I wonder if they’ll fall on the same day.

We’ll cry, we’ll hug, and we’ll part ways. And the next day, we’ll wake up, and we’ll live our lives, wondering how we’ll describe things to the other person when we get home, only to remember that Day Debrief was something we used to do in college, and we’re not in college anymore. It will be the kind of complicated, interesting thing that would be perfect to discuss with S during Day Debrief.

Twenty years from now, I can see us clearly. We’ll be sitting at a café—by then, a latté will be $10. I can see one of us saying to the other, “Do you remember Day Debrief?” 
And the other will say something about how we were so young and had so much time back then. Much will have changed—I wonder what we’ll look like, if S will have had the kids she wanted, and if I will have written the books I wanted to write. But I do know what won’t be different: We’ll still be the Gemini, and I’ll still call her my roommate.