The first person that played a card was Emily with the Ace of Spades: share something you remember from childhood. She told us a story from when she was eight where her favorite butterfly necklace got ripped off her neck when she was playing Elefun. After this, I knew we were in for a treat.
My roommates were so incredibly receptive to the game. We played the card game “President.” The entire deck is dealt equally among all players. The object of the game is to stack cards in ascending order and be the first to get rid of all of your cards to become the President. This allowed us to get through all of the cards in the deck. We had so much fun learning new stories about one another, debating some answers, and even having all of us share our answers.
We all shared the names of our first crushes (I can’t share those answers #girlcode) and learned that all of us have kissed a Joe/Joey. Ava loves her hometown and how invested her community members are into making it a better place to live. Aleezah would want to have dinner with her Nanu (grandma) from Pakistan. Kayla has been in love twice but the love she’s felt for both people feels entirely different. Also, before she goes to bed each night, she tells herself “I love you.” Emily has been meaning to try the double-decker taco bus in Ann Arbor. (We all ended up going after finishing the game!)
We got into a long debate about whether or not everything happens for a reason. Two of us think this is true; the others disagree. The one’s who don’t believe this is true have trouble making sense of the truly terrible and disgusting things that happen in this world. They believe that some things in life are just awful and to leave it at that. We talked about the idea of an afterlife and the fears we have about what exists beyond our time on earth. We hope that our families can all see each other again someday. I read my first essay to my friends and we all cried.
I learned from my friends that there is always more that I can learn about them. I’ve only spent less than a year of my life living with all of these girls and forget that they have had an entire childhood and upbringing that I wasn’t a part of. Emily played us a funny voicemail she left for her dad when she was a child and it was hard for me to even pin the voice to her. Sharing stories from childhood with one another helped me imagine us as kids all playing on the playground together. College can sometimes feel like a simulation. We all hail from all over the country, end up in a town in Michigan for four years, and move back across the country to major cities. These four years are a special place in time where we are free from the restrictions of our parents yet free of the responsibilities of real adulthood. By sharing our past, upbringings, and stories, we have been able to learn and reflect on one another to understand each other and change our ways of thinking as well.
I won the game and was deemed “President” but we all won in our own ways. We laughed and cried and did not skip over a single question. We were completely honest and unafraid to be vulnerable. The next day, Kayla suggested we even play again. I can’t wait to see what I can learn from them next!