Aside from occasional lapses in house-care, my roommates are two excellent guys to live with. Fun, considerate, willing (at least most of the time) to pitch in on collective housework. And, most importantly, amenable to us all living parallel, yet rather separate, lives. Which isn’t to say we don’t hang out regularly. Just that, when we aren’t doing something collectively, we each more or less let the other two do their own thing. The large size of our apartment (large, at least, by New York standards, having both two separate living rooms and a sizable eat-in kitchen) certainly helps, as we rarely end up all piled up in the same tight space.

Increasingly, however, that ‘separate lives’ philosophy seems to be yielding unintentional results. Throughout the last month, for example, a half-eaten slice of cake in a plastic takeout box has been sitting on the top shelf of our refrigerator. And though, to me, a month of refrigerator time would place most pastry well beyond the realm of edibility, I’ve left the thing sitting there out of consideration, assuming that whichever roommate it belonged to was saving it for some specific (elbeit hopefully non-gustatory) reason. Apparently, however, my roommates had been leaving the cake untouched for the same reason, each of us assuming it must belong to one of the other two. In fact, while we still don’t know who the cake belongs to (or how it materialized in our refrigerator), we at least determined that it was safe to finally toss. Still, had one of my roommates not broached the subject in a joke about it while all three of us were in the same room, I’m completely convinced the thing would have sat ensconced on the top shelf for at least another four or five months.

Similarly, despite there being only three of us in the apartment, our shower rack now contains eight separate bottles of face wash. I’m entirely certain that only one is mine, and I’m also fairly sure that, even in their most metrosexual moments, neither of my roommates would purchase two kinds of face wash simultaneously, much less the four or five required to reach our grand count. Where did the extras come from? Can we get rid of them? Occasionally, while showering, I think of asking both roommates. But, really, why bother? We’re happy living our separate lives, and we certainly have plenty of space.