[Bruinrab]

Still, amid the run-in with the police, sleep deprivation and treks to showers, the ideology behind his experiment began to melt away. This became clear to me after I told him that the hunger and homelessness group on campus was doing a “sleep out.” Students would spend one night sleeping outside a campus building to raise awareness about homelessness.

“Oh!” Terry exclaimed happily. “Maybe I’ll do it with them. It’d be less scary if I could sleep near other people.”

Not long after, he began spending most nights on the foldout couch outside my dorm room. In June he rented a room, at which point the experiment was declared over.

“Terry’s living indoors now!” I bragged to friends.

Terry and I are still seeing each other, and he continues to live under a roof.

But my happiness at the experiment’s failure had a darker side. In truth I had enjoyed watching his forays into the wilderness fail night after night because each retreat made me feel better, even superior, about my own safe choices: roof, college, stability. And Terry’s final surrender only drove home the point.

This was hardly something to celebrate, and the dreamer in me knew it.

Lee Conell, a runner-up in the Modern Love college essay contest, recently completed her junior year at the State University of New York at New Paltz.