We couldn’t have known that this place would affect us so profoundly—the six of us. We couldn’t have known that this place would teach us anything about who we were, what we wanted in life, what we feared, how to love. The house was nothing special, just a faded blue ranch with a finished basement that always smelled like a swamp. It was small. It was ugly. It was ours, for one year. On a sweltering June day in one of the last years of the millennium, we moved into 88 Sunset Avenue, a little blue shack planted awkwardly in a cul-de-sac on a street a block away from abandoned train tracks. Our neighbors were made up of grouchy retirees, fellow college students, and a few folks who redefined for us the word “redneck.” We were walking distance from our college campus, but we never did seem to get up in time to actually walk there. Weekday mornings were often spent frantically running around looking for keys, books, and shoes in our disastrous living room. Weekend mornings were usually spent sleeping well into the day, then emerging from our rooms like vampires from their coffins, eyes averted from the sun, arms outstretched for sustenance. Sometimes others were there too, strewn about in blankets and sleeping bags, victims from the previous night’s escapades, but usually it was just us. We liked it that way, after all. We weren’t just six people living in a house, we were Sunset. A clan. A tribe. We spoke our own language and had our own rituals. Sure we had plenty of parties and visitors, but at the end of it all, in the wee hours of the night, the six of us shared a secret world.

Have you ever lived with people who you are not blood-related to? It’s strange how seeing each other in your pajamas and sharing the same bathroom instantly creates a kinship between people. There’s a magic that happens between anyone sharing the same roof. You hear each other snoring at night. You drink out of the same milk carton. Your laundry finds its way into the same wash, underwear and socks all happily mingling together in a sudsy pool. There is something so intimate, so personal about a simple thing like laundry sharing the same basket.

Make no mistake; we were all friends before we lived together—me, Kerry, Bryon, Dave, Dave, and Dave. Yes, three Daves in one house. Sharing that house, though, it changed everything. The word friends became too small for what we were, yet the word family implied that we were somehow forced to love one another, the way you are forced to love your mother’s great, great, Aunt Marie whom you’ve never even met. We had chosen to live together in that hideous excuse for a house, and once we moved in together, everything was somehow new. I never had a sister, so living with a girl who was not my mom was strange for me….and wonderful. On Wednesday nights at eleven o’clock Kerry and I discovered this little known television program in its very first season. It would go on to redefine lifestyles for single women in cities all over the world, but we just knew that it was our Wednesday night-bonding time. No boys allowed. Cocktails and facemasks and girl talk. I had never spent so much time with a girl who wasn’t my mom. Kerry was the older sister I never had, there to give me advice and build my confidence when I had none.   

Kerry and I did of course spend most of our time with the boys- how could we avoid it? There were so many of them. “Smelly boys,” we used to say. There were new experiences there too. I had lived with boys before- my dad and my brother- but this was a different story. Four boys, all very different. Bryon and Dave- who we called Freshman Dave because when we met him he was one year younger than us- were guys. They were pizza-eating, beer drinking, flatulating dudes. They never cleaned up after themselves and used to order lousy pizza from this one place because the delivery girl was “totally hot, dude.” Yet when she arrived, neither of them could say a word to her. Typical guys. The next Dave, who we called Davey, was as much a guy's guy as Bry and Freshman Dave, even more so actually because he was our handyman. Davey could do everything from fix a VCR to build an entire theatrical set with nothing but some power tools and wood in under an hour. A true, man’s man, though when pizza came, he wasn’t waiting for the hot pizza girl, he was waiting for the hot pizza boy. The last Dave, who we called David, also waited for the hot pizza boy, but he was not the set building, power tool wielding man that Davey was. David was more the credit card wielding, go get highlights with the girls kind of man. We were an unusual bunch, but somehow we all just fit together and fell in love.

Some people think that the phrase “fall in love” can only be used in a romantic connotation, but that’s completely untrue. You can fall in love with your children, with a poem, with a mountain range at sunset, and the six of us were indeed in love with one another. We did, after all, spend most of our time together, often turning down parties and crowded bars for coffee and brownies on our thrift store couches. Coffee and brownies became a ritual for us. It was like one of those Mastercard commercials: cost of coffee: $4.25, cost of a box of Pillsbury brownies: $2.50, cost of four-hour therapy session amongst friends: Priceless. We’d eat, drink, and spill our guts about everything: failed exams, late papers, divorced parents, unworthy lovers, coveted acting roles. Nothing was too private or humiliating to disclose, the bitter taste of coffee and the sweet warmth of the brownies so aptly reflecting the tone of out little rituals. I remember during mid-terms week we were so delirious that at one Sunday night session the brownies never actually made it into the oven. Instead we hurled the raw, gooey mixture at one another and happily licked it off our fingers like a bunch of golden ticket winners in Wonka’s chocolate factory. Outside it was raining a warm, spring rain, so we all walked out to our driveway and stood there, letting the rain rinse the chocolately goo from our faces, necks, hands, and arms. I remember standing there, arms raised, head tilted back, all of us cackling wildly. If our house could’ve talk, its voice would most certainly have been a wild, joyful cackle. It would have learned this kind of laughter from us. It was the sound we most often made.

Not every moment was a ride through Candyland, of course. As we all know, life has its dark times, and sometimes it’s those moments where the most intense bonding is done. One of our darkest moments may have been the night David collapsed on our living room floor. David’s body was an electrical disaster and the pace maker he’d been wearing for nearly two years had suddenly failed him. Have you ever had time literally stand still? A moment where nothing seems to be moving, not even your own pulse? This was one such moment. David lay there on the filthy floor, still as a rock, Kerry and I staring blankly at one another, our eyes wide. Time indeed stood still, but just for a moment. Then everything suddenly seemed to move at supersonic speed:

Call 911!

Address please.

Is he breathing?

Oh my god, what kind of a question is that? What if he’s not? What if he’s not? I had never been asked a more terrifying question, and as I placed my head on his chest, I was so relieved to hear his shallow breathing and feel his breath on my nose.

Thank you god, thank you god, thank you god.

How can people not bond after an experience like that? It just pulls you so close together and suddenly you crave the sound of a voice, the smell of someone’s clothes, the sight of a body lying on your bed sharing your pillow, so at home. That is true closeness, true intimacy. Intimate, that’s the best word to describe what were. What we still are.

So how did living in that house for one year change us? We learned true intimacy for the first time. We learned to live with other human beings and give and compromise. We learned how to allow ourselves to be completely vulnerable and still feel safe. For the first time, we had to face our worst faults and our deepest insecurities. You hide nothing from those you share a roof with. But we learned. We learned the kind of work that truly goes into an intimate relationship and the kind of love that is the result. Before we came to that house we had never had to give so much of ourselves to other individuals. Ultimately, even though we didn’t know it then, it prepared us to be generous husbands, wives, and lovers. What it left us with was six people who can still with just a look, know-- just know.

We still refer to ourselves as Sunset, though we have expanded the clan now. I am married to a man who is my best friend and the woman he knows is who she is because of that house. We have all moved beyond the walls of that house, to marriages, careers, and new walls. Happy to still see one another quite often and happy with those we share our new walls with. But some nights, when I see an episode of that old television program, catch the scent of warm brownies, feel a warm spring rain, I long to be in that old, blue house. Just for a few minutes. Piled on the living room floor, the way we were on our last night there, a tangle of arms, legs, and blankets, sharing each other’s breath. So close. So intimate. Our breathing rhythmic, in unison, the man on the radio singing about the forgotten summers of one’s youth, the six of us staring into the dark room and into our unknown futures, unaware that this moment, this house, would leave such a vivid mark on our lives.