When We Were Roommates

Editorial Assistant Emily Chan explores the heartbreaking understanding that a beautiful connection is confined to the past.

It’s a strange kind of pain, not knowing what will never be. For all the details that you noticed, for everything you knew about me, you never knew this, never noticed this. Never noticed us. And I, for all my faults, perhaps made the biggest one of all in letting you go. 

Do you remember the way the moon melted all over my brand-new cream carpet the first night you stayed over? I thought you would notice, and you did. You swept your hands under the moonlight, the pearls on your wrist twinkling. “It’s ethereal,” you smiled, glancing at me. I couldn’t help but wish you were talking about something else. That when your fingers grazed the soft tufts of wool and you grounded your palms beneath your thighs, you were feeling something else. 

You still smelled like embers and marshmallows from the campfire and your voice was slightly hoarse from laughing all night. You were planning on leaving to shower straight away, but I asked you to wait, to stay just a little while longer, and you listened. Tiny pieces of soot freckled your hair, your cheeks, your neck. I brushed the pieces off your arm instead, my face warm. 

You peeled us a mandarin, unveiling its stringy pith, taking care not to puncture the skin. Your eyes narrowed as you tilted the amber fruit in the moonlight, checking for seeds. You fed me, and then you fed yourself. I could taste the salt of your skin. I could taste the cold sweetness of the fruit. 

You pulled my legs onto your lap, playing with the beads on my skirt. My heart thudded. You started talking about the guy you went on a date with the week before. My stomach dropped, but still I hung onto your every word as if it wasn’t killing me. 

The moon slipped behind a cloud and the room felt colder in the swift darkness. I went to dig jumpers out of my closet and you connected your phone to your little Bluetooth speaker, pressing play on our shared playlist. Billy Joel had just started his opening rendition of ‘Vienna’ when I lobbed my hoodie a few too many centimetres to the right, knocking over the glass tumbler—my temporary flower vase. “Slow down, you crazy child,” you half-sang, half-laughed as you lifted me away from the shards of glass. It was so innocuous, so casual, and yet, it was the closest you’d ever held me. Did you feel the rush of my heartbeats the way I felt yours? What I wouldn’t give to have you feel them now. 

It’s a strange kind of pain, not knowing what will never be. Not knowing if your face would still be scrunched up in concentration when you learnt the words to my new favourite song in ten years. Not knowing where to find you in the small pockets of the room, in the spaces you would carve out for me, the spaces where you would be. Not knowing you when it was all I ever knew. It’s a strange kind of pain. 

by Emily Chan