It’s too difficult to have roommates in the winter. Granted, it’s too difficult to have them during any season of the year, but during the winter it involves much more tiptoeing around these people, dancing around the fact that all you want to do is be at home, lazy, languid and looking like total unkempt shit in your pajamas. Without judgment. Without being clocked, monitored, observed. To be at home should mean to be totally free to be oneself. But that’s not the case when one is saddled with the burden of a roommate posing as a relief. That is to say, a financial relief. But what relief is there in having someone constantly there, just lingering, lurking? Especially someone you have nothing in common with apart from a shared inability to make enough money to live alone.

Averil (who was constantly being called “Avril,” though it didn’t necessarily bother her—it was being called “Advil” that did) had shuffled through her fair share of roommates in the years since she had moved into this overpriced two-bedroom in the Mid-Wilshire area. An area she knew from the outset would be impossible to afford on her own. Though, when she had first moved in, it was with her fiancé, Garrett, who made it seem like everything would be just fine, totally manageable. Besides that, he had the high-paying job between the two of them, recently made the creative director at an ad agency called Razmatazz when they decided to move in. In fact, moving to the Mid-Wilshire part of town had been all Garrett’s doing, as Averil would have happily settled somewhere more “white people affordable,” like Koreatown, or Glendale. But no, Garrett was insistent upon this location, telling Averil that it would make it the least painful for his commute to work. In L.A., that’s all that truly mattered when it came to choosing one’s living situation. All other “amenities” be damned—it was “location, location, location.”

And for a while there, Averil could bear the location, even though it meant sacrificing the seamlessness of her own commute. But she was willing to do so as the person in the relationship who made less money, ergo the person who had less power (read: less say). So while Garrett never spent more than twenty minutes in the car, it could take Averil up to two hours on public transportation to get to her job in El Segundo (though one hour if everything went accordingly—but when did anything ever go accordingly? Least of all when it came to the reliability of L.A.’s public transportation). Where she worked as a receptionist at a dentist’s office. The only thing more common in L.A. than a plastic surgeon’s office.

Needless to say, it wasn’t what she had hoped to do after graduating from Otis, the private art school she was now working to pay off in the wake of taking on the required student loans to go there. And yes, it was lately increasingly challenging to feel “artistically inspired” when this is what her life had become. She was already experiencing this form of “low-level” depression even when she still “had” Garrett. It got much worse when he arbitrarily decided to up and leave her one day, about one year into living together. To announce his grand exit, he chose to make a romantic dinner for her, complete with the ambience—candles, dimming the lights, putting on Ariana’s Positions album—to go with it in their apartment.

Once the last bite of the chocolate mousse had been eaten by Averil, he was quick to confess, “I’m going to move out at the end of the month.”

Averil almost vomited the entire meal up on the table right then and there. Where was this coming from? She thought that things had been fine. Not great, maybe, but at least fine. Why would he blindside her so like this? And yes, in her mind, it was much crueler to provide this romantic diversion only to dropkick her in the stomach immediately afterward.

Her automatic question was, “Did you meet someone else?”

His easy answer. “Yes.”

When Averil started hyperventilating, Garrett jumped up to rub her shoulders, look her in the eyes and say, “We haven’t done anything…much. But I know she’s the one for me and that I don’t want to be with you anymore.”

In between her panicked breaths, Averil demanded, “How…could…you…do…this…to…me?”

“Oh baby. I’m doing you and me both a favor. Would you really want me to stay in this relationship, go through with our wedding plans and then wake up soon after to realize you were in a loveless marriage?”

Averil burst into tears. “Why don’t you love me anymore?”

Garrett looked away from her gaze. “You really want the truth?”

“At this point, you might as well.”

He sighed. “You’re so demotivated now. It’s like you’re on autopilot. And just, like, fucking content. I can’t be with someone who doesn’t seem to have any fire in their belly, any ambition for her future.”

Averil wanted to kick him in the dick. Excuse her for being a little distracted from the future when she could barely keep her head above water in the present. Too busy working a shit job to pay her half of the rent. And what was to become of her now if she was forced to leave this place? She would never be able to get an apartment on her own. It was Garrett’s income that had gotten her name on this lease. She wasn’t very eager to try her hand out there in the wilds just because he whimsically opted to abandon her.

It was in that instant that she understood how little she actually cared about the relationship. All she cared about was not having to move. There was nothing worse. Except, well, having to get a strange roommate. And they were all strange, of course. Because people are not only strange when they’re a stranger, but also when they’re your idiosyncratic, overly talkative, annoying-ass roommate. In the time since Garrett had left her to fend for herself in this place, about four years ago now, Averil had gone through five different people. But they all might as well have been the same. Because they were all an unwanted presence, a hostile entity within her environment. Only it wasn’t just her environment anymore, was it? When she tried to complain about this to the two friends she kept in regular contact with (one of whom could afford to live alone and the other with her boyfriend), they asked her why it felt so novel to her if she had been sharing the space with Garrett before.

The question vexed Averil as it should have been obvious that there’s a vast distinction between living with a significant other—which entails a unique form of intimacy and comfortableness—and some asshole who responded to a posting on the internet. At the same time, Averil wouldn’t have wanted to live with a friend either. She’d done enough of that in the past to know that living with friends is what could end a friendship. The only plus side to living with people she wasn’t close with was that she didn’t have to talk to them…much. Though when she did, in the communal areas like the kitchen and living room, it was a torture. The nodding along, the pretending to be civil when all she wanted to do was run back into her room without having to engage. To worry over having to engage.

Most irritating of all was the fact that Averil wasn’t the type of person who could just “be seen” in her natural state by people she wasn’t close to. She had to bother with putting a mask on in more ways than one in that sense. A makeup mask and a “civility” mask. But in the winter, that became more of a burden for her than usual. And no, just because she lived in L.A. didn’t mean she wasn’t subjected to darkness and inclement weather like the other parts of the world going through winter at the same time. Because of this, she wanted to be a blob. Freely. Without the prying eyes of another. Without the risk of having to talk, no matter how briefly. It was during this season, no matter how many years had passed, that she would always yearn for Garrett again, wishing he had just stayed so that she could relish the joys of intimacy, and the freedom to be silent and disgusting that came with it.

This latest roommate, Sean, was probably her worst yet on the talking front. Every time she ventured into the kitchen, whether it was just to make a coffee or cook a full-fledged meal, Sean would pop out of his room like a jack-in-the-box to talk to her, babbling on about nothing and making her wonder why he never went out. Oh sure, everyone wanted their money’s worth when it came to paying rent, which meant staying in regularly enough to get the most out of what they had surrendered from their paycheck in order to have a “roof over their head” (even if it was still someone else’s), but this was ridiculous. It was all the worse because Sean became a “work from homer” after already moving in. This meant that not only was he always there (and making the kind of low-paying money that rendered him too broke to go out), but he was always using resources. Averil’s PG&E bill was becoming far more nightmarish to receive than it ever had been in the past. In short, Sean was driving her the craziest of all. But when he had the audacity to make a comment about her still being in her pajamas at two p.m. (even though it was Sunday), something she had rarely done in his presence, that was the last straw for her. She knew she had to somehow take control of her life again by taking control of the entire apartment. No more profiting from the equal desperation of others who couldn’t afford to live on their own either.

That Sunday, when she had foolishly believed she could exist in her own home without judgment by appearing in her pajamas in front of another, Averil made the solemn vow that she would not be this person anymore. The kind of person who had to rely on anyone else (save for an employer) to help her pay rent. So it was that she commenced her furious search for a higher-paying job—even though she knew it would still be in the banal administration field. When she unearthed an opening at a prestigious plastic surgeon’s office (an easy pivot from the dentist’s) in Orange County, she knew she had a chance at affording the apartment on her own. The catch, of course, was that Orange was way too far to even attempt using some kind of public transportation to get there. She would have to capitulate, after all these years, to buying a car. Which meant she would now also be fulfilling the prophecy of that ouroboros-inspired Metric lyric, “Buy this car to drive to work/Drive to work to pay for this car.” But it would be so worth it, wouldn’t it? To at last live alone. To come home to no one. Be seen by no one. This is part of the reason she could never understand why people were supposed to feel pity for Michelle Pfeiffer as Selina Kyle when she walked into her abode and called out, “Honey, I’m home!” only to sadly remember, “Oh, I forgot. I’m not married.” Better yet, “I don’t have a roommate.” What bliss, what paradise.

She gave Sean his one-month notice to get the fuck out the day she started her new job. And even though she knew she would really only be able to delight in her apartment on the weekends now, since all of her hours would be spent either commuting or at the office from Monday to Friday, to her, it was so worth it. To jettison the roommate that had become like a cellmate in that each and every one of them had made her feel like a prisoner in there. Confined to her room, to certain quarters so as to avoid them at all costs. But now, there was a new cost: working all the time and rarely being home to enjoy living alone. Because obviously, eventually moving to Orange County was out of the question.