Just before the start of our senior year of college, my best friend Makayla and I became convinced that we had died.
During one of our first nights living together we were kept up all night by the methodical chirp of our carbon monoxide detector. At the time we dismissed this as annoying but ultimately unimportant, figuring that the battery was probably just low. The battery was in fact not low. The detector was doing its job. Whoops.
Initially, Makayla posed this theory as a joke. It fit with some of the other theories we had started to formulate–primarily that our apartment sat upon some sort of leyline (we had lots of evidence). So maybe we hadn’t died, exactly. But we decided that our apartment, most definitely, was a portal. A tangible nexus of friendship that would, over the course of four years, completely and utterly transform us. This theory proved itself to be true.
Prehistory
This particular apartment (colloquially referred to as the 348) had remained in the possession of UC Santa Cruz’s long form improv teams for many years. Almost always the tenants were seniors–the lucky few of us that had managed to rise through the ranks of the highly exclusive comedy teams. I was one of them. At the time, I wore this identity as a badge of honor–we all did. Pretentious! I know.
(As I write this I’m also tempted to clarify that I did not belong to a secret society, but something holds me back. It’s impossible for me to remember college without remembering comedy. For the entirety of my chapter in Northern California, I was part of this tightly knit, wonderfully chaotic family. A small crowd of big personalities, in love with and at odds with each other, bonded through a shared, niche obsession. Is that not a secret society?)
Makayla and I made it onto one of the two long-form teams winter quarter of our freshman year. With our admission to the team came our ticket: a space in the car driving us off campus. In retrospect it’s easy to say that yes–the 348 was our friendship terrarium, it was the world in which we grew to love each other. But we didn’t know that then. We were still strangers as we ventured off campus, to that mystical land of college kids living together.
Geography (Physical)
The 348 was an upstairs, three-bedroom apartment located near Santa Cruz’s microscopic downtown. The main living space was connected to the kitchen in one snaking space, much longer than it was wide. The bathroom, wedged between our bedrooms, was a maze. Inside it the shower and toilet were in two separate, tiny rooms, each with their own lockable doors. For four years this architectural design puzzled me, but it made for a convenient roommate setup. Notably, Belle, Makayla and I each had our own rooms; sacred, decorated distinctly. We never went into each others’ rooms unless we had been given permission, or were invited in.
Geography (Metaphysical)
The 348 wasn’t just an apartment. It was a hallway. And, like its many previous tenants, I was just passing through. The concrete, monumental nature of the apartment disguised the nature of what those years in Santa Cruz really were–a transitory, fleeting era of my life, in which, four years later, they still don’t quite make sense.
In 2017, as a visitor, I could feel it already. The 348 was the crux of my new adult world. Here I would stumble through my last two teenage years. I would write sketches, stay up until dawn, wrestle on the carpet until I bent my wire-frame glasses in half. I would accidentally set my hair on fire, watch Twin Peaks, kiss my friends. I would silently navigate crushes that were so disgustingly, exhilaratingly vast that it was impossible to behave normally (but oh, did I try). Everything had this obscene, serious vibrancy–a quality that is difficult to translate, even through the lens of my memory.
Living there myself, however, was another story completely. No longer was the 348 a place to spend the periphery of my days. The apartment that had grown familiar in one context became familiar in another. Suddenly I knew what it felt like to take a shower in that odd, detached corner of the bathroom. I knew what was in the fridge. If I fell asleep on the couch during a party (as I was prone to) no one would wake me up to say that there was an Uber on the way, that I’d better start putting my shoes on. My shoes–all of them, not just the ones I had arrived in–were at the top of the stairs. Never again did I have to knock on the front door and wait for someone to come downstairs and let me in. I had the key.
Rituals of Cohabitation
Long walks along West Cliff at night, searching for ghosts (never successful)
Take-out tacos and enchiladas from Perico’s, to be eaten on the couch while watching Mad Men (we were really into Mad Men)
Laughing so hard that we cried (obviously)
Doing our makeup over one of the two sinks in the bathroom (before going to Communist Discos or dimly lit bars downtown)
Makayla coming into my room in the mornings to dish about whatever had transpired the night before (me in bed, makeup smudged on the creases of my eyes, Makayla laying on the carpet in a pose we fondly referred to as ‘shrimpin’ —this could sometimes last for several hours).
Vanilla bean sheet cake from Trader Joes, eaten with spoons right out of the tin (one of the only foods I miss from America)
Sitting on our yellow velvet couch ‘Charlie-and-the-Chocolate-Factory-Grandparents Style’ (usually sharing a blanket, as we couldn’t afford to turn the heat on)
Comparing Tinder matches (so many overlapped, and in a small college town the drama of a run-in was terrifying and delicious)
Existing for days by candlelight while the entirety of Northern California’s power was out (thinking obliviously that this would be single greatest disruption of our senior year…not the events of March 2020)
The song Operator by Låpsley (playing at full volume in Makayla’s gray Prius as we drove to school)
Watching young Jude Law compilations, directly followed by Nathan For You (lethal combo, would not recommend)
Watching the carnival episode of Euphoria season 1 every night for months (not an exaggeration, idk what our deal was. Our fixation was so intense that we could recite the lines like it was the Rocky Horror Picture Show).
To name just a few.
Seeing a place through the eyes of ownership–even if it’s temporary, or an illusion–is a process of passive transmutation. I’ve started to wonder if maybe that’s always been the case; memory bending to reshape a geographical location once you’ve gotten to know it. Curiously, those early memories are rarely, if ever, erased. In my mind I can still see the 348 (Santa Cruz, also) as it was my freshman year. But stripes of memories fold above it; a gradient of familiarity endowing these geographical places with a totally new quality, unique and contained to that era of my life.
In my mind I can see Makayla this way too. Holding with great reverence those first moments when I saw her in the audition room and had no idea that she would be my best friend, that the rituals of our friendship would completely reshape the foggy, sleepy green world of Santa Cruz. Impossible to tell, really–whether the city changed because we were in it, or if the city changed because we were in it together. I want to believe that it was the latter.
Further, I want to argue that friendship–specifically best friendship–shapes geography in the same way that weather does. Santa Cruz, objectively, was a tiny city. The 348, objectively, was just an apartment. But living in both places made them ours, made them open. We were only 21, certainly–but what is 21, if not a reversal of gravity? We experienced firsthand the way everything shifted that year we lived together; the unimportant a tsunami, the important a running joke. This sort of energy had to go somewhere. It couldn’t exist inside us alone. To me it only seems natural that the raw, ridiculous, heart-shattering power of that year had to live where we did, even if it was only temporary.
This essay has been marinating in my head for a very long while now. It was only when I sat down to write it that I realized how big the topic actually was, and how impossible it would be to say everything I wanted to in one piece alone. Living with best friends has changed my life in so many ways, and I want to immortalize those moments and people as best as I can. Here’s to long form writing!! Thank you for being here.
xx Sidney
~
If by some miracle you made it to the end without being subscribed, I can help you with that!
i loved Lapsley!