The new apartment and neighborhood were nothing less than what my imagination had concocted: packed sidewalks, cars lined up in traffic jams, residences that were exactly adjacent to one another. There was no room to breathe in isolation in this busy city, but for some reason it didn’t seem as repulsive as it would have years ago. Perhaps I had grown to like forced company. Or rather, I had just reached that point that I no longer gave a about my living situation, as long as I was nowhere near rotting in a dumpster.

Moving into a single bedroom apartment to live alone was a daunting prospect, even to a grown woman in her late twenties. There was just something so distasteful about the loneliness of sleeping and waking alone. Something so scary about no one being there to call for emergency services in case I accidentally slipped in the tub and died. God, would anyone even hear my loudest screams?

But then again, there was only a slim possibility of my life being endangered to the point that I wouldn’t be able to reach a cellphone to call for an ambulance myself.

“Soph, what the hell do you exactly have in these boxes? Bricks?” Mia complained with a look of disdain as she hauled two stacked boxes up the stairs and into my new apartment. The three of them had volunteered each other to be my slaves for the day the minute I informed them about my move. And so here they were, blaming each other for offering a helping hand, because they forgot the gruesomeness of move-in days.

“Probably a magazine stash, eh?” Clara cheekily answered for me with a smirk. I could only guffaw and elbow her in the gut as I unloaded more boxes and suitcases from my car. 

“Who still spends money to maintain a stash nowadays?” Sam commented with a condescending chuckle, as if she knew exactly the ways to get around today. “Hello, it’s a free for all on the Internet now!”

“Of course you’d know, honor student.”

“Obviously.”

And so, after five hungry and stressful hours, the four of us unpacked my entire past to decorate this bare apartment that I could not yet call home. As I stared blankly at the black and white pictures of my friendships, I wondered if I could ever call it home. It was a place with no memories, and I was not motivated to create any either.

As I caught my mind wandering from my own edited photographs to the darker, hidden sides of the stories of which they narrated, I felt Clara’s presence linger beside me. I sensed that she was trying to decipher the buried stories that these happy photographs hid behind an opaque curtain, as usual. But I was not about to narrate the stories that she had no idea of. There was no reason behind revisiting a closed chapter left in the dust when I had to write the next words of my tale.

“Oh god, remember that house party?” She pointed to one of the smaller pictures from the collection on my wall. It was a black and white edit of a picture we took in the middle of intoxicating ourselves with cheap alcohol and dancing vulgarly in a circle. The lack of saturation in the edit somehow replaced the classlessness of the scene and situation.

A decade ago, we were ignorant, daring freshmen, who looked forward to pointless house parties to take our minds off concerns and issues that seemed so grandiose during that period in our lives. But those problems seemed so petty compared to the ones that we laughed over currently.

“Yeah, the night we all met.”

It was our first cheap “Girl’s Night Out” as a set four. As the years went by, we replaced sketchy jungle juice with expensive mixed drinks, cheap shots of vodka with hard liquor served in crystal shot glasses, and the basement of a frat house with an