Couch, sweat and tears

It has been a year since my friends and I were kicked out of our house. While bittersweet, the anniversary also reminds me of the moments when my roommates became my friends. The following took place when I didn’t have much experience of city life yet.

We had decided to give our living room a makeover. We threw the shagpile rug down the stairs. The small, itchy, black, hard, ugly sofa also had to go. On gratisaftehalen.nl, we found a big, soft, ochre-yellow, comfortable, beautiful sofa for collection less than ten minutes away.

My Chilean-Irish roommate took the lead when it came to the aesthetics, bringing art, plants and her gently chaotic lifestyle into the house. I became swept up in her obsessions and plans. The night before we were to pick up the sofa, she suddenly asked if I wanted to go with her to a bar that no longer exists. After the bar, we ended up at a concert of middle-aged men in green make-up. The green drops of sweat in their chest hair soon became too much for me. Meanwhile, my roommate disappeared into a mosh pit.

The next morning, she didn’t come out of her room. She was often late, but I got nervous and kept knocking on her door until she called me in. I found her in bed with a tall man. “We get the sofa for free, so we really need to go now”, I said, a little put out. She jumped out of bed wearing yesterday’s clothes.

The sofa had to come down from a fourth-floor flat in one of those buildings with narrow, steep stairs. My fingers hurt before we even got downstairs and we still had to carry the thing down the entire Delfshaven shopping street. Once we’d reached McDonalds, I couldn’t go on any further. We had to put the sofa down. The Schiedamseweg became our living room for a while. As passers-by smiled down on us, I was introduced to my roommate’s one-night stand. He was a quiet, solemn cook who smelt of old sweat in a way that put me in mind of cumin, with a hint of weed.

We eventually got the sofa into our living room and enjoyed it until we had to leave it behind in a hurry when we were thrown out. Now, a year later, I still feel glum sometimes when I think about our living room. I lost my roommates, but gained friends.