My roommates are fighting over the future of our house. For me, it seems that this is a fitting bookend to our slightly broken home. This house was mythic before we even lived here. Pushed out by University housing and determined to make our Senior year living experience the best it could be we took an unconventional approach and went door to door, Seventh- Day-Adventist- style right around dinner time. We went to the most beautiful and desirable houses we could think of and asked the slightly bewildered inhabitants if they had any future plans to move out. Some people laughed at us; some were frightened by our questioning as though we might give them a reason to want to move out soon; others shared their experiences on how they landed such good fortune. On one of the early trips we accosted a student leaving the upstairs apartment of his friends. He told us his friends were moving out and invited us upstairs. We idled in their kitchen while they made pasta, nosed into the most intimate spaces of their bedrooms and I even used their bathroom. We would look at other houses but we could not get that place in out of our minds. It was a bedroom and living room short but still it seemed perfect. We were willing to overlook all common sense and shortcomings for it.

Over much arguing to which I was not the liaison, we somehow wrestled not just the apartment, but the whole house from the landlord. This house has been in his family for a long time. His mother had apparently died in the house and his son had brought his first child home to it. It was a big decision and sometimes still I wonder whether we were worthy. The house had four bedrooms, and there was the worst character-revealing process of choosing rooms. I remember after it was all said and done. I wanted to move out, I could not imagine living with roommates who would make people feel bad about themselves all in the name of a better street view. But I settled into my room trying to push all of my furniture through the bathroom that was the only inside access to my room. Yes, you have to straddle a toilet to reach my room. My sister was visiting and we looked at the room. We took down the blinds that had been blocking the light and suddenly the room was bathed in an incredible afternoon glow. That week, with the help of my boyfriend, we tore up the stained carpet and painted the rough wood below. We were constantly sweating all week pulling up carpet nails, but we would collapse happy and satisfied with our labor onto the mattress I had temporarily set up in the hallway. The flat-pak bed I brought home from ikea was like a roof-raising, all those I loved bending and straining underneath the frame. Those early weeks I wore a path down the street to the True Value and installed new shelves in the kitchen, making it my own. I never did replace the curtains. I preferred to look out from bed into the back. While it is commonplace in this neighborhood for these backyard to be paved over decades back this one is still preserved. A couple of months ago, I dug up a part of that backyard planting a garden. I never expected that anything would come of it, but I could not have been more proud of the first tentative shoots striving in the cigarette butt rich soil. I even tied a hammock to the two porch supports and took the first slow swings half expecting the whole house to rock with me.

So that’s the thing, it gets worse every day, as we drag more of our emotional and physical baggage all over this house. It just gets harder and harder to leave it. It looks like only one of us is staying. Perhaps it seems strange because she is the roommate we least believe lives here, preferring to spend most of her time with her family. The whole year she has left little more evidence of her life here than her travel size shampoo bottles in the shower. And so now that “travel- size shampoo” roommate is left to tend the future of the house my other roommate is up in arms. My other roommate has never had a house before. She has lived in apartments her whole life. I am grateful that she has had the opportunity to run up stairs to her room. She is also the one that found a fish in the abandoned fish tank months after we moved in. She served to foster this small miracle. She views this very house as the most remarkable thing at USC. Short of turning down Ivy league law school admissions I know she would stay. “Fish-miracle” roommate is not having travel shampoo roommate decide the fate of the house. “You know she wants to have her cousin live here,” she tells me fuming. “He doesn’t even go to USC.” She is so offended, she can barely get the words out. The cousin is 27 and will be working down town. “What kind of 27 year old wouldn’t be getting his own place,” she says. I think of the passing of those short five years and feel defensive. I had come to this house in search of a home and I believe I would feel the same thing I did in it a year ago, five years from now. I have little choice, I told travel-shampoo roommate I was moving out and in the same conversation she told me she had already given my room away to a friend who had seen it from the back yard. I wonder if her friend felt the same way I feel about it when I get a glimpse as I carry food in from a picnic out back with my roommates.

I will not tell this friend that I found out that the carpet was the only thing insulating the room and that I needed three blankets to keep warm this past winter. I will not tell her there is a hole in the floor under my lamp that I filled in with putty carefully smoothing it with sandpaper. I will not tell her that when someone walks on the porch upstairs it sounds like the roof may fall in. I will not tell her when the sun comes up it fills the space with the most beautiful golden light you have ever seen. Because those are things you only know about a house when it is home.