This wasn’t a surprise. I’ve been sharing a room with the same girl for four years now. Yup, I’m almost 22 years old and I still sleep about three feet away from someone every night. I know her pretty well, to say the least.

On the outside, my roommate and I probably seem like opposites. I’m an introvert, a planner and a logical thinker — a “duty fulfiller,” as she likes to say. She’s more of an extrovert, she hates planning anything in advance and she can be a little crazy sometimes — not that that’s a bad thing.

Basically, I’m Monica and she’s Rachel from “Friends” — a comparison I obviously resented at first but have gradually come to accept as the truth.

From day one, we realized there were going to be certain things about each other that would annoy us — like her barging into our room when I’m sleeping and talking to me for hours and me being overly critical of her sometimes.

But when you live with someone — 3 feet away from someone — for four years, you realize that, no matter how crazy they sometimes make you, they not only become a part of your college experience, they become a part of who you are.

College roommates are the people who really know and understand us. They see us at our best and at our worst. They’re sitting on the couch when we come home from a job interview or exam we just nailed. They’re there to hug us — or give us space — when we lose someone. They’re with us the nights we drink too much at the bar. They’re there the nights we just want to sit at home and watch “Wedding Crashers” for the 87th time.

Our college roommates are the ones who help us when we are sick for the first time our parents aren’t there to nurse us back to health. They’re the ones who will sit up with us until 3 in the morning talking about relationship problems. They have our backs, they stand up for us and they put up with us.

I’m a senior now, which means I only have eight weeks left of school. Only eight weeks left of sharing one tiny little room with the person who probably knows more about me than anyone else in the world.

Eight more weeks with the girl who reamed out my ex-boyfriend on the phone freshman year, who has seen me cry on the bathroom floor and who has tucked me in bed. Only eight more weeks watching “Pride and Prejudice” clips late into the night and making prank phone calls and laughing until we cry.

And I just realized how much I’m going to miss that when we graduate. My roommate won’t be sitting on the couch when I walk in the door and need someone to rant with or cry with or laugh with. She won’t be there when I need fashion advice or dating advice or life advice. And I won’t be there when she needs a logical head to tell her everything’s going to be OK.

There are eight weeks left of school and right now, everyone is thinking about where they’re going to be at the end of the semester and what they’re going to be doing. But all I can think about right now is who I’m going to be with — or without.

Because nearing the end of my college career, there are a few things I’ve figured out. And one of them is that one of the most important things about college is the bonds you form here. These are the bonds that will last for a long, long time. They’re the bonds you’ll tell your kids about one day.

So, yeah, my roommate might never wash the dishes, she might constantly lose her keys and she might accidentally leave the door unlocked sometimes, but because I’ve spent four of the most significant years of my life with her, those things couldn’t matter less.

She has helped me learn to cherish the things that really matter about people, and forget about the things that don’t.

Katie Harrington is the opinion editor at The State News and a journalism senior. Reach her at harri878@msu.edu.