Numbers Game

I can still remember the day we met.

It was move-in day for the freshman and all of Smith Hall was buzzing. Kids were walking up staircases with boxes in their hands obstructing their views, making them completely unaware to the other students trying to get by them. Josh and I had already been living together for over two weeks, having moved in early because we were part of the football team. The room we lived in was built to accomodate two roommates, but we'd chosen to allow a third person to live with us to ease the housing crunch and also save $500 per semester off our housing bills.

The day finally arrived for us to meet our roommate, Ryan Thompson, whom I'd called earlier in the summer just to get that first nervous conversation out of the way. He seemed like a nice enough guy over the phone, but I had no clue what he looked like. So when I came back into my room from flagging my mom down in the parking lot and saw the back of a small, skinny kid who couldn't have been older than 16, I knew Ryan had arrived, but figured the figure sitting on the bed in the middle of the room was his little brother.

Hi, I'm Ryan. Are you Josh?

Heeeey, no, I'm Sean. Josh is out getting lunch I think. Nice to meet you.

Of course, what I learned over those first couple of months is that it wasn't nice to meet Ryan. His bed, which hadn't been in the room until the day of his moving in, created some serious space problems. As did the extra desk they shoved into the room...along with the spare dresser. All these new things upset the rhythm Josh and I had just begun to establish and sent the room no bigger than a solitary confinement jail cell into disarray.

We bickered constantly, struggling to find a common ground between his love for quiet and stillness while studying and my need for music or television noise in the background. He hated my music and asked me to either turn it down or off nearly every day.

Our schedules conflicted. I always seemed to have time off when he was studying. There were times when I deliberately did things to upset him and get him to study somewhere else. Where, I didn't care. There were times when he said things that got me so angry, I left the room to keep from punching him right in his stinkface.

Seaaaaan...

He always used to say that, switching from higher octave to lower when he got to the A. It was such a condecending tone (or at least I took it as such) that I started doing and saying things just to get him to say it because it was his sign of frustration. I loved to frustrate him.

Eventually, the craziest of things happened...we became friends. He, Joshua and myself began going to dinner together at Take 5. We'd talk about the matters of that day and just random things in general: a recent Simpsons episode, a joke Conan O'Brien might have said that Ryan missed because he always haaaaad to be asleep by 9 o'clock. At least it felt like that to me since I never went to bed earlier than midnight. Things weren't perfect, but we learned how to tolerate each other, then how to not mind each other's company, then how to -- gasp! -- enjoy each other's company. By winter break, things weren't perfect, but they were OK enough to where changing rooms between semesters was no longer a threat. It set the stage for some amazing things in the upcoming semester.

The three of us began having late-night talks after Conan's monologue, which we'd watch as a group as Josh mimicked Conan's little opening hop. We'd talk about anything and everything, me or Josh usually bringing up the topic and Ryan giving his self-assured opinion and Josh and I bouncing off that. To this day, I think those talks are what turned us into the group we affectionately call 203. Unity was fostered in the penny fights I'd pick with Ryan which would start only after all the lights were out. I'd hit him in the face. He'd hit the window behind me. We'd all play Super Smash Bros. on my Nintendo 64 and create our own game-playing vernacular. Boot to the face! Donkey kick to Hell! Quit poaching my kills! Poke-lag. Crossfire! There are times when we get together now that we still play, like we did last Wednesday, and everything comes rushing back to the fore...as if it hasn't been eight years since we lived with each other.

So much has changed since then (including his height!), the biggest of which being that Ryan is getting married in two weeks to a wonderful lady named Holly. Josh and I now have a code for how we classify girls based on how Ryan gushed about her in the early stages of their dating. If she's "amazing," then she's wifey material because when he began telling us about her, all we remember is him saying "she's amazing" in a way that we just knew something was up. When we lived together, I always used to tell him he'd get married before either Josh or myself because it was perfect Godly irony that he had the shortest dating record of the three of us and would find his wife first. Sure enough...

I also told him I'd be happier at his wedding than my own because of some of the sour luck he'd experienced. I don't know who deserves it more than him. I wish one day that I can have his character. It'll be a long time coming, that's for sure.

But now that he's getting hitched, it also means he's leaving, both literally and figuratively. A couple weeks after the wedding, the newlyweds will move to Northern California, which I'm pretty sure will put a crimp into the number of 203 sightings. I'm no expert, but I'm pretty sure about that one. It's a weird little mixture of incredible happiness for his joy and the sadness of losing the availability of one of my two best friends. I think in my own little selfish way, it's a good test run to get me ready for when they leave the country, which is coming sooner than later. I don't know that it's something I look forward to. Gonna miss him.

I pray it isn't the end of 203. Some guys disappear after they get married. I don't think such is the case with the old Ryebread, but you never know. You can't predict these things. You can't have 203 without all three of us. It's a strange mixture when we come together that can't be described. Two of us together isn't the same as all three. The dynamics just aren't the same. Wednesday reminded me of that and made me nostalgic for the days when we literally couldn't go two steps without running into each other.

We're older, hopefully wiser and growing up. But part of me still misses the late-night talks and penny fights.