Stefanie Preissner

Farewell to the Boy Housemate

Is it just me, or has anyone else been stunned and devastated by something they knew was inevitable? Once, I remember crying until I got sick because my swimming togs got wet when I went into the sea. I was young; I didn’t understand that swimming togs were designed for that very purpose. As a kid, I spent so much time trying not to get things wet or dirty that walking into the ocean in brand-new swimming togs seemed like a delinquent act.

You often see viral videos of children sobbing because their bubbles burst in the wind or they want their apples to be bananas. My point is that overreacting is adorable when you’re a child. As an adult, it ain’t cute. But cuteness was the last thing on my mind when The Boy Housemate gently delivered the news that he was moving out, moving on, moving away.

The Boy Housemate and I moved in together before anyone had heard of an iPad. You had never used Instagram, or heard the term ‘influencer’ when The Boy Housemate arrived at the door of our Phibsboro home with his rollie suitcase and aversion to small talk.

I didn’t know him before that evening but he claims he knew ‘of ’ me. We were in the middle of a wild house party the night he moved in, which, looking back on it, gave him a profoundly false sense of what his life with me would be like.

We have lived together for more than 3,000 days — that’s longer than he’s lived with some of his younger family members. It’s enough time for political parties to have been formed and disbanded, for CDs to become extinct, for at least nine X-Factor stars to have blown up and then disappeared. Nine years is a long time.

The estate agent rings me.

“Could I get a reference for an applicant interested in one of my properties?”

How can I possibly capture all of his assets in one brief phonecall?

My head spins. Sure, he always pays his rent. He’s never trashed the place. He doesn’t smoke or set fire to things. But that doesn’t begin to capture The Boy Housemate or how lucky any landlord or housemate would be to have him.

Shop surprises

Should I tell the estate agent that he puts out the bins on a Monday night and never forgets which one is due for collection? He folds the towels in the bathroom the way they taught him in the linen department of Arnotts. He watches TV shows and tells me if I should watch them, knowing that my short attention span and limited interests mean only one in 10 TV shows will pass my litmus test. He’ll always bring back the same sugar-free protein bar when I ask for a surprise from the shop, because he knows I hate surprises.

Salted Caramel Fulfil bars are the least I have to thank you for, Boy Housemate.

Thank you for making the changes in my life easier. Don’t think I didn’t notice that when I stopped drinking, you never again drank in the house. Even though we never spoke of it, I will always be grateful that when I stopped eating sugar, you stopped baking. Thank you for turning the volume down on the television every night as I leave the room to go to bed. Thank you for never inviting your friends over because you know I hate having strangers in the house. Thank you for living with me. Thank you for putting up with me. Thank you for showing me that I am capable of being lived with.

Thank you for telling me, when my heart got pulverised by The Californian for the third time, that if it happened a fourth time, you wouldn’t be my friend any more. Thank you for being my friend when it happened a fourth time. Thank you for giving me a warning whenever you delivered bad news.

Thank you for putting up the Christmas decorations every year. Thank you for not minding that I changed the decorations around because they weren’t in the right places. Thank you for always googling any query I ever said aloud. Thank you for grappling with ideas with me, for helping me to write TV shows and books and articles.

I pause on the call with the estate agent. Maybe if I give him a terrible reference, he’ll never find a place to move to and have to stay with me. Then I look around the kitchen at the memories we’ve created. The framed still image from the documentary we did together; the canvas print of us in the ruins of our last house after it burned down. The artwork he designed of me and Nana after she died. There isn’t a way I can capture it, and the estate agent really doesn’t care.

“Yeah,” I say, “He’s great. He’s just great.”