We’re two students who moved away from home for university. We left to study, as so many young people do every year, and we ended up in the same situation as everyone else: a new city, a room found in a hurry, and on the other side of the wall people we hadn’t chosen.
In the first years it went wrong more than once. Opposite hours, different ideas about tidiness, guests and quiet, arguments that two questions asked beforehand would have avoided. It wasn’t anyone’s fault: nobody had simply asked us anything.
Then there were the other houses. The ones with flatmates who wait for you for dinner when you’re back late from the library, who go through your notes with you the night before an exam, who keep you afloat in the months when exams seem never to end. Many of them are our closest friends today.
The difference between those houses was never the flat. It was the people.
