In my senior year, I lived in a house with five other girls. When I tell people that, I get a lot of people asking: “why?” (it was cheap and I knew none of them were murderers); or “sharing how many bathrooms?” (one, and it was fine); or “was it awful?” (no, it was great). Apparently a lot of people hate their roommates, or remember having roommates they hated, or just can’t stand sharing their space. But I’ve almost always felt really close to my roommates. I’m a major homebody, so there’s nothing nicer to me than being able to socialize in the comfort of my own apartment. And that year, with five other girls who I barely knew when we moved in together, I hit the jackpot. We all knew each other vaguely from having classes together, and we all were drama majors in a small arts program at a big public university, so we had a lot in common, but we certainly weren’t best friends when we moved in together. But when you live in a tiny house with six other people, you get to know each other very quickly, and we all became really good friends almost right away, in that way that you can become close when you’re in school and keep weird hours and can stay up past midnight talking about your dreams and your childhood and the cute guy you work with who you might have a crush on.

We threw parties together, made family dinners for each other, and had movie nights together. We planned our class schedules around each other, so whether we were on or off campus, we were nearly always together. It was everyone’s senior year, and we knew we wouldn’t all end up in the same city once we’d graduated, so there was a bittersweet quality about it too. We knew our little community had an expiration date, and that we had to take advantage of the rare opportunity to spend every waking second surrounded entirely by women we adored. There was only so long we could live in our slumber party utopia, where there was always a girl to ask if you needed a ride to class, or if she could make you a smoothie, or if you wanted to eat pizza and watch Daria together. Those girls nursed me through stomach flu, and I drove one of them to the hospital when she got mono. We applied for grad school together, celebrated the holidays together. They became my family. But we knew it was just for that school year.

We spent our last day together on the floor in our living room watching Mona Lisa Smile. It’s a movie about a bunch of women in their senior year of college, figuring out what they want from life and who they want to become. At the very end, the girls all move to different cities and make wildly different decisions about what to do with their lives. In the very last scene, the girls are on their bicycles following Julia Roberts (their mentor and erstwhile art history professor) as she leaves campus, never to return. It’s a sad moment, but I still find it awfully optimistic. As they all slow down, unable to bike as fast as Julia Roberts’s cab, they fall into sync with each other. They’ve lost their mentor, but for that moment, they still have their friends.

My roommates and I all cried watching that scene, and then we too went our separate ways, to Los Angeles and New York, and to tour with a Broadway show. We don’t see each other every day now, don’t spend every night together eating cookies and discussing our dreams. We live thousands of miles apart, so the logistics just don’t work. But we have group messages and we send each other care packages and letters and support each other wherever we go and whatever we do. Even though they aren’t sleeping in the next room anymore, I know those five girls are still my family and aren’t going away, and if I ever happen to be in town, we can make a slumber party utopia again.

–By Kelly D., 25, San Diego, CA ♦