I anxiously awaited the day that MCLA would finally post room assignments online. It was in the middle of July, while I spent weekends checking off items I needed to buy for my first year away at college, wondering what my future roommate was going to be bringing. I assumed the worst, I imagined that she would hate me, or even worse, decorate her side of the room in hot pink and zebra print.
Oh, god. She's gonna hate me. I thought to myself as I scrolled through her Facebook pictures after the website finally posted my room assignment. Look! She has piercings! She is WAY too cool to be friends with me. Like most first year college students, my anxiety got the best of me. I often heard roommate horror stories, a lot of which were from my friends. To make matters worse, I was a transfer student. I thought I would be all alone and that it would be hard to make friends on campus because everyone else my age would be a returning student, already set in their group of friends. I didn't want to get my hopes up, so I had come to accept that my roommate and I would probably be civil at most, and I prepared myself for a difficult adjustment at school in general.
I could not have been more wrong.
Once I finally had the courage to send her a message (it took me about a week and resulted in me throwing my phone after pressing the first "send", I discovered that my roommate and I had a lot more in common than I thought. Through our back and forth messages and Facebook creeping, I learned that she too was a transfer and the same age as me. I didn't know that MCLA typically housed transfers together, and it turns out that most of the girls in my suite were transfer students as well. Once I knew that, I felt much better. I suddenly didn't feel so alone.
I was still intimidated by Caitlin upon meeting her. I introduced myself covered in sweat and out of breath for climbing up five flights of stairs with my luggage on the hottest day of the year on move-in day. She had already settled in her room, it was sparsely decorated with neutral colors. She seemed mature and well put-together, I worried if she judged me while my parents and I unpacked my side of the room, sweaty and flustered while my dad snuck in a lame joke every now and then. As soon as my parents left, I felt so lost. I started to worry if I had made the wrong decision by moving away to school. I was an anxious mess and had no idea how the rest of the school year was going to play out.
As it turns out, I was very lucky. Caitlin, our suite-mates, and I immediately all bonded. We piled in each others cars as we made trips to Walmart to buy the most powerful fans we could find for our overheated rooms, played "Cards Against Humanity" together, ordered copious amounts of pizza late at night, and had impromptu dance parties when we should have been doing schoolwork. My first year away at school was the best year I've ever had, and I have my friends to thank for that.
But Caitlin and I have a different bond. Maybe it's because we were roommates, maybe it's because we are so alike that it's scary. After rooming together for a year, I noticed that our friendship this year (no longer roommates) is much stronger. We were the only pair of roommates last year that genuinely had no problems with each other whatsoever, we consider going to Target a hobby, we could (and have) spend hours at Whitney's Farm befriending the animals, and the only time we "bicker" is when we're insisting that the other person have the last slice of pizza, saying violently nice things like, "You take it you beautiful angel!!" and "No, you have it you deserve it you're so amazing!" We may get weird looks from our friends as we try to out-compliment the other, but that's just the way our friendship works.
To summarize, I am so lucky that I was paired up with Caitlin last year. She is the sweetest, most selfless person on the planet and I truly cannot say anything bad about her no matter how hard I'd try. Like I said, our friendship is different. Perhaps it is some magical roommate bond or we're just two random girls destined to be BFFS. Whatever the reasoning may be, I wouldn't change our friendship for the world.
