My Old Roommate’s New Apartment
by Liz Wyckoff
I recently visited my old roommate in Brooklyn. I don’t live in the city anymore, but she’s still there. Still next to Prospect Park. Still a short walk from all the things I miss: the backyard at The Farm, the muffins at Blue 
Sky, the polyester dresses at Beacon’s Closet. There are plenty of things about it that I don’t miss—that’s why I moved away. Only, now that I’m out of her life, my old roommate has moved into a new apartment—one so heavenly that I can’t believe how lucky she is to be rid of me.
“I haven’t seen a roach in two years,” she said off-handedly, as I opened my suitcase on her spacious hardwood floor. This seems impossible. We had bugs in both of the old apartments we shared. Maybe I did something to entice them out of the cracks in the walls and onto our kitchen counters? In our first apartment, we killed a cockroach by chasing it into the dishwasher, then running it through the rinse cycle with all our dirty dishes.
Now, in place of cockroaches, my old roommate has pots of flowers and herbs. She’s cultivating basil, heliotropes, and Vietnamese coriander. In the window, there’s a sensitive plant that curls its leaves inward like praying hands at the slightest touch.
Above the fireplace in our old apartment, a pocket of water once appeared after a storm—a belly of polluted rain expanding from the wall like a pregnancy. The layered skins of paint stretched until my roommate and I stabbed the bubble with a knife and watched the rusty juice dribble out. We’d painted the walls in that living room. All by ourselves. Now my old roommate knows better. She asked her landlord to paint the walls of her new apartment, and it was done before she moved in. The new walls are off-white. Clean and pure.
She says she misses me, my old roommate. But when I see her in that new apartment, I understand why she’s still living in Brooklyn and happy without me. It’s almost enough to convince me to try again.
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