It was a nine-hour flight. I didn’t expect Rome to be so hot and for me to be so tired. I thought the thrill of studying abroad would keep me awake. But I just couldn’t wait to nap. I had no idea who you were, and the whole ride from the airport to our apartment was spent wondering if this was going to be a great experience or a horrible one. When you go away to college, at least they give you a name and you can look them up on Facebook, but you were a mystery to me. I arrived at our home for the next 4 months and you were not there.

I thought to myself, “ok well this gives me some time to look at the pictures on her bulletin board and make assumptions.” And that’s exactly what I did. Shortly after that you came home and introduced yourself as my roommate. After me thinking that your name was Breanna at first, you clarified, “No, it's Brenna.” (This wasn’t going to be the last time I messed your name up hehe). You started to tell me what I needed to do in preparation for school, you immediately started to look out for me, and that never ended.

Looking back on it now, I can’t remember a time when I still considered you a stranger. In my mind, I went from not knowing you at all to not being able to imagine my life without you. We quickly learned how similar we were but also how extremely different we were. The obvious example, our techniques of getting ready in the morning. You absolutely killed it every single day with your perfect makeup and your outfit appropriate hairstyle. Don’t get me wrong, I envy you and your efforts, but I’m your polar opposite. I leave myself about 7 minutes every morning to get dressed, and before leaving, I would look in the floor length mirror in our hallway and say, “this is as good as it gets today”.

From a young age, I learned to embrace the mess, hence why you used my hairbrush more than i ever did over the semester. Another thing, you were the most organized mess I have ever met and I say that with 110% of my heart. I will never forget the night I woke up to the sound of a curling iron falling out of your bed, while you were sleeping. Whenever something was missing the constant joke was, “Brenna did you look in your bed?”, on too many occasions the missing object was there. Except her passport. (Too soon?)

Thank you for never getting that mad at me for not wanting to go to a club, and thank you for understanding that I didn’t like wearing crop tops. You eventually just stopped asking me if you could do my makeup because you knew the answer. Thank you for listening to everything my scrambled brain was going through. Thank you for holding me when I cried at The Office series finale (still unsure why that hit me so hard). Thank you for always taking great candid photos. Thank you for accepting my quirks and weird OCD. And thank you for doing my laundry sometimes even though you turned my favorite white underwear grey.

You were my support system, and I hope you saw me as yours. You were there to build me up when I wasn’t feeling too hot, and you were there to keep me sane when everything got the best of me. We are young girls away from home, so there will be emotional breakdowns…and there were emotional breakdowns. You always knew what to do. Whether it was making me the dinner that you thought would taste like home, or leaving me a note in the morning saying that coffee was on you that morning, you understood me in a way no one really ever has. You saw sides of me that not even I knew. You forced me to think about the end game, when I really didn’t want to. The end was heavy and I can’t imagine it without you. You sat me down at the end of the night and asked me to explain thoughts that I would’ve rather just kept to myself, but that was not allowed in our room.

I will never forget a conversation we had shortly after returning home. You told me to put my heart on my sleeve and asked me what I had to lose. I responded with, “well I could potentially lose my heart, or rip a perfectly good sleeve”. With a heavy sigh as if you wanted to strangle me for being so cynical, you said to me “I’ve done both, and I promise they can both be fixed.” For the first time in my life, someone was looking out for my heart other than me. I gained another sister, a therapist, a hair and makeup artist, a personal chef, and a fellow creative mind, but most importantly I gained a best friend. We may no longer be roommates, but 227.5 miles is nothing when I have a lifetime of memories to look back on.