Life at home has been strange the last few weeks. The three musketeers have been one short, and it’s easy to see that two guys are having the run of the house. It’s not that Jon and I are gross-messy, with dirty dishes and smelly clothes laying around (this is mainly a function of having a dishwasher in the kitchen and laundry in the garage). We’re just messy-messy. Shoes and blankets on the floor, towers of DVDs and empty boxes in odd locations.

The dynamic between two instead of three is different. In the small window of time the three of us shared before the accident, we spent our time joking, mocking each other. Dr. Jarboe would explain it as social penetration through fantasy chaining. We even had a literal chain:

Jon: Giggity,
Sarah: Giggity,
Me: Goo.

The last part usually ended in me failing and being smacked in the back of the head.

So, with an excess of time to ponder our mortality, Jon and I have amazingly turned out to be pretty good friends.

Originally, I moved here based almost entirely on how well Sarah and I meshed when meeting, and the fact that she was one of an infinitely tiny minority of potential roommates to use paragraphs, punctuation, and correct grammar in her craiglist advertisement. The people I choose to live with are a more important factor than the house or the location. I wanted to feel at home in this home, and relationships are what establish that feeling.

At that point, Jon wasn’t even in the picture. We had Adam, a soon-to-be graduate student moving from Chicago. He got here, looked around, left. Apparently it was too ghetto. And he wanted his own bathroom. That attitude alone makes me glad he decided to shuffle off instead of stick it out, because I don’t think we would have jived. Plus he was like 5’8” and short guys weird me out. Leprechauns and such.

A week later, in comes Jon to see the place. In some cosmic alignment of fate, it turns out that we’re two peas in a pod, or so my mom said while visiting. We mesh well in what I think is a sort of symbiotic relationship. Both of us would probably remain inert without someone else to share an experience with, or to be the other’s audience. For me, this fills a kind of empty slot that was left as Dwayne and I grew apart because of moving, school, and job schedules.

Now tomorrow, instead of fiddling with layouts or drawing out editing work for the whole day, the two of us are going hiking.

We’re keeping Sarah in the loop too, with texts and pictures from our adventures, and a promise to replay them all with her as soon as she’s back to 100%.