N. and Z.

I'm standing on my desk chair trying to drill pilot holes into my window frame for a curtain rod, trying not to fly backward off the swivel chair and out the window. N. and Z. dart into the room with bright yellow t-shirts wrapped around their heads. They duck behind my bed. They crouch behind my desk. "What the fuck are you doing?" I say. "We're ninjas!" they say. "You're wearing bright yellow t-shirts," I say. "What kind of camouflage is that?" "We're ninjas!" they repeat.

(This isn't the ninja look. This is Z. trying to make N.'s hypercolor shirts turn colors.)

We have a conflict with the sublessor about pets in the household. N. keeps saying, "We want to make room in the household for both our human animal friends and non-human animal friends." He will not refer to dogs as dogs. I think he does this in part because he knows it is ridiculous, in part because he is a bona fide hippie.

Z. comes into my bed when I and other person are undressed in it. "Can I lay down thanks!" she says. It's not a question, but a statement, and before it is completely out of her mouth she is lying between the two of us. "We're going to the Pork Store," she says. "Wanna come?" She recalls how recent dance rehearsals have been. Her friend, a Filipino boy with hair down to his waist, hangs from my pull-up bar and explains how another hair-collecting charity is better than Locks of Love. Then they leave for brunch.

Sometimes when Z. and I hang out in the kitchen, she plays music from her laptop right toward our faces, and it is so loud that we have to shout at each other to be heard.

N. pulls out the measuring tape fifteen feet and lines it along the wall. He shows me the technique for a gap jump from standing - where to throw my weight, where to place my hands, how to land. We take turns leaping for distance in the hallway. I can't get past seven feet. N. launches like a spring and lands like a cat.

Sometimes Z. comes into my room crying, and then we lay down in my bed and I put my arm around her and give her a hanky to blow snot into, and then we talk for a little while and sometimes I will command her to stop crying. Sometimes this works, and she'll smile. Sometimes I'll get choked with fear and doubt thinking about an ex-lover/doctor's mental health diagnosis, and Z. asks questions that only convey curiosity, no judgment, until I am calm and capable again.

N. and Z. shout down the hall, "Want some FRIES??" so I join them in the kitchen. They're eating enormous burgers, even though N. hardly ever eats meat and Z. is 4'10" and hardly needs food to remain alive. I clean their plates of curly fries and normal fries, then apologize for eating everything. "There's Chinese food in the fridge too," they say. We talk about Z.'s apprenticeship with a healer and her own approach to energy work. N. is quiet, because there is something else on his mind.

Z.'s parents stay for three weeks in July. They cook Ecuadorean chicken dishes and serve me a unique pineapple-oatmeal beverage. Q. pronounces it Cuaker. He says, "That is how they say Quaker Oats in Ecuador." They leave behind gifts: for Z., a matching pajama set in lime green, with the words "I <3 Me" printed all over; for me, a giraffe's head on a cork; for the apartment, an old black and white image of Z.'s mom, a beauty in her youth, which we put on an end table next to a wood cut-out in the shape of Israel and the Palestinian Territories.

I come across N. and Q. stoned in the living room. "What are you doing?" I say. "Watching trailers," they say. We don't pay for cable. All we seem to get on the television is video on demand trailers. They have passed hours watching trailers. "It's better than movies," they say.

We're all leaving the apartment at the end of the month. Moments like these only happen between people who see each other all the time, in unstructured ways, in shared spaces. I'm going to miss these fools.