This was my roommate’s way of cornering me into a deep-and-meaningful. We had just finished playing a game of extreme Scrabble, and I lost as usual and wanted to escape to my room, strongly disliking confrontations, but she wouldn’t let me.
It was my second year living with her, and things have rapidly deteriorated to a zero point. Talking about stuff would be like giving Michael Jackson a Botox injection. This was my personal manifestation of everyone else’s confirmed nightmare – that sharing proximate living space with someone, especially a friend, can and often will turn into a fate worse than SWF. Missing clothes, missing CDs, constant berating on my never using a coaster and my sea of snotballs made me scream for a life of solitary confinement (where I can sniffle as I please!). And those are just the mentionable things. From being best friends who did everything together, I had come to a point where I could barely even stand to speak to her.
But now she wanted to, and opened with a wispy line that hinted at reconciliation. It ended up being a labyrinthine trap that I could not thread my way out of, because she is twistedly smarter than me.
I left Sydney without so much as a goodbye except "Give me my bond back, bitch!" (she still has a Vivienne Westwood shirt of mine, dammit). I needed space and distance and forgetting, to peel off that grimy feeling of deeply shallow resentment.
Now that I’m in a "happier place" I choose to look back on the things that I’ve taken from her. Not clothing, not her Hikaru Utada CD, nothing material – just ideas and thoughts and little bits of isms I’ve collected by default. That’s what you get for moving in with a depressed Philosophy student with a chaotic background – although Filipino, she grew up in Canada, calls Tokyo her home, went to boarding school in Australia at the impressionable age of 14, and strangely, observes Jewish holidays.
It was a challenge at every turn. She was two years younger than me, but she helped me with my homework while neglecting her own. She loved to talk deep ideas, Descartes and Derrida, as well as clothes, Kundera and Calvino, but she forgot about the life outside our four walls. From her I learned about that most interesting of cultures, the Japanese way of doing things, which is historically steeped, aesthetically amazing yet socially bizarre. Our apartment was a decorative mix of minimalism and Japanese art kitsch – low-slung furniture, spinning tops, swirling pottery that spoke of haiku poetry.
And without me realizing it, she used me as a debating partner (according to the rules of philosophical logic) and thus took the contrarian point of view every time, much to my ingénu-ine frustration. She once bugged me and made me explain my faith once, which is kinda ridiculous, because faith is "just because." To which she said, even if she did know that a Creator existed, it would make no difference to one’s life. We would still see a chair and sit down on it. She asked me my thoughts on being, and I responded with humanistic intentions and lofty ambitions. She threw back a manifesto on how people are inherently selfish, that there is nothing we do that doesn’t serve one’s own ends – even being friends with other people is ultimately selfish. And who says you have to do anything with your life? Progress, success – all constructs and illusions.
I huffed out of the room, ready to pack up and get the hell out. How could I live with a person who doesn’t believe in friends and doing anything with one’s life? But she came to me and apologized, admitting she just tricked me into a losing argument. Giving me a hug, she said, "you’re my friend" and with that placation, proceeded to filch my new clothes and move in her jobless junkie of a boyfriend who ate all the food and never helped with the bills.
So it was at the end of one of our mad Scrabble games, something we hadn’t played in a while (she being a violently sore loser), which for me was becoming less fun and more of a ritualistic ordeal, like an old bored couple having sex, that she tried to talk to me, like really talk. "I am in your life," she said cryptically, "so that you know what you are." I did not know how to see myself from this, her point of view. I did not know what she meant.
Ironically – or perhaps naturally, just so – it is when I’ve forcibly put time and distance and forgetting between us, forgiveness of wardrobe loss and all, that I can shrug off the bad things that have happened and try to pick up the gingerbread crumbs that were dropped along the way – find a path back from the destruction of something formerly sweet.
And so I think about friends and what we are supposed to mean to each other. Are we attracted to people because of qualities they reflect about us? Or because of something we admire that we lack, thus adding to our cachet? Are we friends because we make each other feel good about ourselves, reinforce identities through parasitic, mutual admiration?
I’ve come to believe, contra-Jerry Maguire, that we are "complete" on our own, and those we love, only make us fuller. Yet I also believe that this very completeness is nothing complete at all – an identity, a life, is not fixed but always in flux, recreating itself with every new hello you have at me. My roommate once said that when you think you could love a person, then you already do. I only understood that when I did meet someone I thought I could get to know and like, and who knows... but then I realized that the thought of it was already it – love existed and was real, perhaps nebulous and nascent – it just had to be actualized in time, in words and in deed.
A quote I’ve used to try and decipher my rambling rogue of a roommate is something the sage Milan Kundera wrote in Identity, "This is the real and only reason for friendship: to provide a mirror so the other person can contemplate his image from the past, which, without the eternal blah-blah of memories between pals, would long ago have disappeared." A touch of the cynic, but if at that time she was trying to tell me I didn’t need her, she was also saying the reverse – that she needed me to tell her that she didn’t need me – in effect, that she was alright, and that things were really OK between us, underneath the tense surfaces and all that will remain unspoken.
And that’s how it came to be. I don’t keep in touch, but I doubt she harbors any anger or ill will. I know that like me, she remembers the good times and lets those take precedence in the gallimaufry of snapshots we take from our lives. That despite, or perhaps because of time and distance and the inevitable power of forgetting, what should matter is the instance of time when we were powerful, that burning point of a single star cast from a blanket of a thousand lesser others. Dimmed not by dwindling e-mails of half-hearted how-are-yous and half-yearly attempts at resurrecting something that already had its time. It is a clean break and I know she thinks this way too because it is something that I learned from her.