As it turns out, good things are supposed to come in pairs. That’s what they tell you.
Two sweet cherries sharing a stem. Two shoes that make a set. Two sides of an argument. Or, as Dr. Greenberg recently educated us in Introduction to Organic Chemistry I, even molecules seem to prefer balance in pairs: enantiomers, mirror images that only make sense alongside each other.
That’s the rule of twos: order, symmetry, equilibrium.
Which is why nothing could have prepared me for walking into my dorm room on Aug. 17. I arrived, armed with Twin XL sheets, a standard Target box fan and the hopeful illusion that my dorm room would be a cozy little sanctuary like the aesthetic, fairy-light haven I’d spent all summer envisioning on a carefully curated Pinterest board (Title: Minimalist Dorm Room Inspo).
Instead, I walked into a triple. Three beds, three desks, three dressers, all wedged into a space that was clearly designed with two in mind.
Living in a triple in your first semester of college feels like being dropped into a social experiment that no one fully signs up for. How much space can three strangers share before they lose their sanity? How many repetitive pre-9 a.m. alarms can coexist in one room before the walls start to shake? Who cleans the bathroom, and what happens when no one remembers whose turn it is? These are the questions you don’t see in the admissions brochure, but now, as suitemates sharing a triple, they define our day-to-day lives.
During the first week, it was clumsy as expected. FaceTime calls overlapped in English, Spanish and Hindi, all bleeding into one another. Other times, we tiptoed around our combined shower schedules, trying to avoid colliding in the bathroom before our 9 a.m. classes. Not to mention, our sleep schedules rarely aligned — midnight could mean the rustle of an organic chemistry textbook being cracked open just as I tried to close my eyes. Privacy was a myth none of us thought we had any chance of sighting.
And yet, slowly, we began to adjust to the small things: an extra serving of fries brought back from FFC because someone remembered I liked them, three cups of herbal tea made instead of one when the freshman flu made its inevitable rounds, the golden shower of fairy lights we all agreed should glow above our desks. So, somewhere between late-night study sessions that always morphed into laughter, shared bowls of Buldak tteokbokki in the study lounge, Disney movie marathons and the madness of a month-overdue bathroom deep-cleanse, I can dare to suggest that we’ve stumbled into something like a rhythm.
So maybe the rule of twos makes sense in a chemistry textbook or a picture-perfect Pinterest mood board, but sometimes, the magic of madness comes in threes. It’s messier, louder and harder than ever to manage, yet, it holds its own like a tripod: steadier than any pair of legs or a chord stronger than a duet.
My dorm wasn’t what I envisioned when I unpacked my Target box fan that early morning on Aug. 17, and somewhere in the middle of it all, I’m still figuring it out — how three people can carve out space in the geometry of a triple, and how that space, impossibly, begins to feel like home.
Samika Jain is a freshman from Mumbai, India majoring in Molecular and Cellular Biology.
