The City of Roommates

By Claire Cordonnier

“When you’re young, you don’t need much to survive,” a hair stylist told me recently when I was getting my hair done somewhere near 60th street. That’s right, if you keep your necessities cheap and uncomfortable, there’s more money to spend on frivolous things like hair treatments and overpriced clothing.

As you get older, your physical needs become more demanding and uncomfortable things become even more so. New York is full of discomforts, and these can’t be tolerated as easily by the old as by the young. 

The things that make roommates annoying are the same things that make the city annoying. And aren’t roommates more so a “young people” thing? 

One can’t get too far away from their fellow New Yorkers; we’re all siblings in a way. We all live close enough together to observe and be annoyed by each other’s dirty habits. We’re all constantly in one another’s way: blocking the sidewalks with our slow walking, hampering the stairwells with our meandering steps, and causing our business-casual fellow New Yorker to miss his train and wait another 6 minutes.

It’s not enough to check the street intersections for cars, you must also check for the lightning swift biker that comes hurling down the gray street in your direction, who’s trajectory seems prepared to yield at nothing. In more residential areas, your every step ought to be one of caution, as the sidewalk is never guaranteed to be clean. At night, the random unexplained yelling of strangers and the persistent, long honks of cars keep you up.

Our lives occur in such close proximity to one another, we’ve probably both contemplated our deepest sorrows in the same subway car, or enjoyed a happy morning coffee in the window seats of the same cafe. These are not new ideas. We express our affection for one another often in the form of distrustful glances and unsmiling faces. Reluctantly, we’re roommates.

How many young people are here in New York, just living off of the adrenaline of being in the city, that mixes with their youthful feelings to give them a sort of immunity to New York’s discomforts? I hope that they enjoy it.