Top 10 Ways to Fall in Love With Your Flatmate

  1. Your hands accidentally bump while doing the dishes one night. You laugh softly and flick a bubble of dishwashing liquid at them. At night, drifting off to sleep, your heart feels oddly clean and new, as if it, too, had been washed.
  2. Slowly, and then all at once.
  3. On Tinder you come across them and swipe right, as a ‘joke’. You start a conversation that turns into so much more than a conversation; you feel, for the first time, that someone recognises your complexity. You begin to forget what loneliness feels like.
  4. You have awkward sex after flat drinks one night. There aren’t a lot of other options out there for you. You already know that you can live together functionally. What the hell?
  5. You watch them take the bins out on Sunday night. Your interest is piqued when they flatten the cardboard and rinse the milk bottles. But when you see them sort the high-density polyethylenes from the polyvinyl chlorides, it’s game over baby. Your ensuing passion will never need recycling.
  6. Your hot water cylinder fucking sucks. You decide to shower together so no one has to have a cold shower. You drop the soap. Goddamn, you’re so clumsy. Why does everything you touch turn to shit? You start crying, and hope the shower disguises your tears. It doesn’t. But she holds you.
  7. He reminds you of your dad. The big hands. The gentleness that makes you feel so safe. You laughed when you learned about Freud in PSYC112. Who’s laughing now.
  8. You get sick. They make you a creamy soup. When you feel better, you thank them with a ‘creamy soup’ of your own ;)
  9. Be a snowball running down into the spring that’s coming.
  10. Start off as friends, and slowly realise, over the course of the year, that you wish you were something more. Never work up the courage to tell them. Live the rest of your life with the crushing weight of your own cowardice, forever wondering what might have been.
This article first appeared in Issue 4, 2019.
Posted 8:03pm Thursday 14th March 2019 by Critic.