I’ve spent the last few months of college lounging in my roommate’s room. Her walls are full of tidbits, posters, postcards and two photo strips: one of us and the failed attempt right before. As I lazily lay in her bed and stare at her sitting cross-legged on her giant gray chair working on her laptop, I feel a sense of longing despite only being a few feet away.
Janya, my roommate since freshman year. It feels wrong to call her that now. She’s my best friend, my platonic soulmate.
We’ve lived in and out of each other’s spaces for four years. We’ve slept feet apart, cried under the same 20-pound weighted blanket, shared our big gallon of oat milk and my various lip glosses. I think about the time we spent sitting on our dorm floor eating takeout and googling the cures to our sore throats. Or the way she’d wordlessly hand me a granola bar before exams, as if that could fix my anxiety. It always did.
There’s a version of me that will only ever exist around her, a version of me that’s softer, more tender, sillier and less guarded. We know how to be quiet together. We can sit for hours doing our own things. Nothing about it is remarkable, but I already miss it.
Soon, I won’t be able to walk into her room and flop onto her bed without knocking. I won’t hear her fumble around in the kitchen while I yell some half-thought-out crisis into the air, waiting for her response. In a few weeks, I’ll have to text her, and that feels wrong.
It’s strange how some people become constants without any ceremony. No dramatic turning point, just years of small moments stacked on top of each other until you can’t remember a version of your life without them. She feels like a presence that’s always been there, even before I met her.
I see myself searching for Janya in every relationship in my life. As I sit in front of her, crying through rejections, talking about her job offers, her getting ready to move somewhere so far away, speaking with her through first dates and relationships, I realize I’m already trying to hold on. To bottle something that was never meant to be kept, only experienced.
She’s the only person who will always have rights in my life. The kind that means she can sway me with a look, say the thing I don’t want to hear and still be the first person I turn to. I think of her when I make decisions, when I fall apart, when I’m trying to figure out who I’m becoming. There are people I love deeply, but she’s the one I will always go to.
Sometimes I wonder if she knows how much she’s held me. Not in big, dramatic ways, but in all the quiet ones. She has sat with me through sadness without rushing me out of it. She remembers the names of professors that have made me cry and the kinds of food I order when I’m sick. She always tells me the truth — even when it hurts — and then stays with me after. You don’t realize someone is your whole world until it’s time to say goodbye.
When I took her to my hometown, I watched her frolic through the places I once called mine. As we sped down the road near my high school, in the same car I got my driver’s license in, I watched the wind move through her shoulder-length hair. Her braid was stuck on her shoulder, swinging gently as we walked through my favorite bao shop, the cafe where I opened my college decisions, the room where I grew up. It was surreal watching her inhabit the pieces of my past I’d always kept to myself. Like time folding in on itself. Like something I didn’t know I needed.
Every few weeks, I get jealous. Janya is the best person I know. I wish I had known her when she was seven, or seventeen. I imagine us on a playground somewhere, or in a crowded high school hallway, finding each other again and again and again.
Why does it take time to get to know a person? I want to know everything about her, and I don’t want it to take time.
But maybe the point was that we found each other when neither of us knew how to ask for what we needed, but somehow gave it anyway. Maybe it wasn’t about knowing everything, but knowing enough to stay.
That’s what makes leaving so hard. I don’t know how to imagine the next part of life without her in it the same way. Not gone, but no longer just down the hall.
If there is only one person I can call a soulmate, it will always be Janya. She will forever be the love of my college life.
Aashi Mendpara is a senior from Orlando, Fla. majoring in Neuroscience and Medicine, Science and the Humanities. Her column shares reflections on her childhood, growing relationships, getting older and navigating life’s changes.
