• I’d never lived on my own before.

    I had been living at home my entire life. When I was eighteen, I graduated from high school. I took the next two years off to go abroad with my mother to Europe. In Europe, I became rather fluent in French, Italian, and because our neighbor, Russian, I only spent a year out of the country before spending another back home. I was twenty by the time I was going to live on my own for the first time and later on in years, I suspected that that’s exactly what my parents had wanted all along. Still, I wasn’t stupid enough to try arguing it. So, when the fall came back around and I started packing for college, my parents bought me a flat closer to the heart of New York City – closer to NYU. They’d wanted me to go to Vassar, but I’d insisted on New York University. I told them that I just had a good feeling about it – but in reality, it was within walking distance from the flat they bought me my freshman year. Originally, it had just been me in that flat. I’ll get to that, though. My parents were in the Hamptons, so it wasn’t like I lived totally away from their control… Still, I had finally gotten a taste of freedom.

    My freshman year was rocky. I’d never had freedom to do what I want and when before, and I definitely abused it. My parents almost dragged me home when my grades started to take the downward slope. I got my act together and pulled them up just in time to narrowly avoid a ticket home. My sophomore year, I turned twenty one and met a girl named Anne Francis Steinberg. Anne was definitely not the Debutant girls I’d known back home. She was from California and her father was a pretty wealthy salesman. She was also, as her name suggested, Jewish. Though, she’s the worst Jew I’ve ever met. Still, Anne was fun and different and taught me about guys, sex, and alcohol.

    She tried to get me into smoking, but that didn’t take.

    We were friends almost immediately. Then, early into my junior year at the age of twenty two, she lost her place because her landlord needed to sell some property to stay afloat in the recession. I convinced my parents to let me move up to a larger flat with two bedrooms so that Anne could become my roommate. We had to work out a deal where Anne and I came up with at least half of the rent – but it worked out and Anne moved in with me three weeks later.

    Over the next few months, we got closer. We had to work out a system of rules that I never thought I’d need for a roommate. For instance, if one of us ever got “lucky” – we had to shoot a text to the other with a fair warning. Then our “date” had to be informed that walking out of the room naked was definitely not cool – and in the case of me meeting one of Anne’s many, many, many dates… No, I was most certainly not interested in a threesome, thanks very much.

    Still, awkward encounters aside, I very much enjoyed living with Anne. She wasn’t in college – and had in fact, been cut off from her parents because she refused to go. She felt classes and homework were a waste of what she considered to be her very valuable time. I never voiced that I thought getting drunk and having sex was strangers wasn’t exactly a better use of it – but rather let her be who she was. After all, she didn’t exactly agree with my choices all the time.

    One of the more notable things about Anne had to be the strange habit we both developed of leaving odd messages for each other. She had a habit of smoking in the house and when I came home after class once, I was very unhappy to find that the living room reeked of it. So I left a note on the couch – which she would see immediately upon stepping inside the apartment – that read: QUIT SMOKING INSIDE. IT’S SMELLY LIKE MAN-FARTS; ONLY WORSE. So, a sort of battle of notes took place until finally, she moved it outside. We had a balcony. On both sides of a large piece of printer paper, we wrote out a message that we’d taped to the sliding glass door of the balcony. It read: WARNING! I ******** SMOKE OUT HERE, b***h. This, despite my own aversion to swearing, amused us both greatly; especially two weeks later, when a man across the road posted a response in his window. We had a great laugh over it, really. His note had read: THANKS FOR THE HEADS UP, ********.

    This correspondence actually went on for several months until eventually; we met the man on our way to get breakfast. He was a man in his early thirties and he worked at the New York Times as a journalist. He was a comedic advice columnist which, instead of giving any sort of sound advice, he responded quite sarcastically and literally to every single letter he received. We made a habit of picking up the paper from there on just to read.

    Instead of going home the summer before my senior year, I convinced my parents to let me stay with Anne in our flat. That summer, I got trashed for the first time in my life. Thankfully, Anne saved me from accidentally going home with this random guy – a guy that even she felt was sleazy.

    At twenty three, I was about to start my senior year. I didn’t expect it to be much different than the past two years. Anne and I were drifting apart. I was trying to get more serious about starting my life and she was still determined to party until dawn even if it meant being hung over clear into the evening. A struggle, we did manage to hold the friendship together. Sadly, in the back of my mind, I was waiting for the day that it snapped. I knew it was only a matter of when; not if.

    I never expected to meet Malcolm. I never expected any of this.

    My name is Sophia Elizabeth Blackwell. This is my sappy love story.