In a Lonely Place

My roommate aggravates me. She makes me want to bang my head against a wall.

I've known her since we were little. Our moms used to bring us to the only swing set between our houses. There were only two rusty swings with rubber seats that chafed our legs in the summer. We were always the last two to be picked up by the school bus because that was how the route went, so we always sat in the last two seats on the bus. Our parents were the only Chinese immigrants within miles of our middle-class suburb, so they liked to get together for long hours, whispering by the kitchen island. Looking back they were probably gossiping about the other moms and comparing their kids' extracurriculars. They would stand there kneading dumpling dough for so long that we were certain we'd never get to actually eat the dumplings. We were both only children so we sat together watching The Little Mermaid on VHS because we had nothing else to do. We faced the tv, shoulder to shoulder every Sunday night until we became real friends. By chance or by fate- we became sister-like, bonded by common environment, confinement of seats, and parental figures who grasped at each other to feel some sense of community in a foreign place.

A few years after graduating from college, we both moved to New York City. She reached out and asked if we might live together as roommates. I was hesitant- we were always so different, and she had quirks that confused me at times.

Moving to the city was not easy for me. In my mid-twenties I felt overwhelmed, underwhelmed, over-stimulated, yet exceedingly lonely in a cycle of never-ending 9 to 5. The friends I had in college lived elsewhere, and any sense of belonging I once had felt more like a memory with each passing day. But she felt familiar, so I agreed and she was overjoyed.

When we moved in, she became interested in collecting plants for the apartment. It started with a succulent, then grew to be a jungle of all types- some with Swiss cheese holes, some with pinstripes, and some with pointed tips. Most she found by wandering the streets of New York, which she did often in her free time. One time, she found a 40 pound potted plant on a stoop and called me out of breath, to bring a cart out to transport it back home. I begrudgingly agreed and told her she needed to Lysol the whole damn thing in the hallway before it was allowed inside.

To make sure our plants had enough air and direct light, she opened our apartment windows for a few hours a day. Soon, I noticed dozens of small flies circling our apartment endlessly- we'd smack one down with a slipper and another would appear. This went on for months. I later found out she'd also go into my room without my permission to crack open my windows when I was away on the weekends.

I told her to close the windows as we didn't have mesh guards on our windows and she agreed to close the windows and bring her plants to tan with her in Central Park instead.

She also wanted to pick up new hobbies. She was passionate about being eco-friendly, so she decided to start making her own dishwasher pods.

She ordered bags of soap flakes and baking soda from Amazon and got to work. She used all of our ice cube trays to pack in the powdery components, and let them sit out on our kitchen table over night to dry and completely harden into "pods". Eventually, we ran out of store-bought pods- you know, the normal kind- and I had to start using hers. Every time we ran the dishwasher the dishes reeked of hot, leftover food. Stains were left in streaks of brownish orange. I told her that her pods did not work and that our dishes were still dirty. Don't worry, she said. I'm going to tweak my recipe. I could not wait for her to tweak her recipe, I was frustrated and quite frankly disgusted. So I bought a 500 pack of pods from Amazon and Venmo charged her for half. She accepted the request.

Six months into living together, her mother passed away. I held her as she cried from night through morning. We stayed bent in the corner of her sun-streaked room, cradled between two lush plants that she'd painstakingly raised by methodically misting, repotting, and repeating. Over the next several months, I tried to do the same for her, methodically taking all the steps I thought I should take to bring her back to life. I revisited her corner every day, opened the blinds, brought a cup of tea, and repeated. I found myself wanting to take care of her, like she took care of us in our little apartment. I wanted to nurture her in little ways, just the way she re-purposed every plant she found abandoned on an apartment stoop, gave each one light, fresh air, and the right amount of water. I wanted to share tenderness with her the way she always did with me... the way she cracked open my window to air out my plants when I was away for too long.

The way she tried to make dishwasher pods for us to share, and the way she chose not to be offended by my critique when I rejected her oddities.

The way she poured kindness into our living space, and the way she included me in her endeavors to rescue every abandoned plant in New York City, so that we could beautify our home together.

A year has passed. We still have too many dirty stoop plants and dirty dishes, and she still makes me want to bang my head on the wall from time to time. But I think we're both grateful to have found a home in a lonely, foreign place.