WORST ROOMMATE EVER: Except Not Really

This post was originally intended to be a part of a writing challenge. It remains as a testament to my inability to complete writing challenges. There was going to be a punch line here but I can't be bothered to think of one. 

I rented a duplex in Midwood, Brooklyn with four other people who were in the same program I was in. We never met our landlord, who was totally cool with renting to five twenty-somethings with a combined income of HAHAHA TEARS. Also, because we were all on separate coasts before moving to New York, I forged everyone's signature on the lease. But I digress.

The apartment was a big one, especially to us because we'd all been prepared to live on mattresses in a tenement with fifteen other people. It was kind of far from everywhere; three of us commuted to the South Bronx, one to Harlem, and the other to even deeper Brooklyn. But it was a cute neighborhood, and quiet and safe. We were literally surrounded by Hasidic and Orthodox Jews. Practically everyone on our street was chosen except for us, our downstairs neighbors (musicians, borderline cute but also: musicians) and the Tong family on the other side of our duplex whose internet we "borrowed." (We also did not turn the heat on once that year.) Everyone had their own bedroom except for myself and the girl I shared with, but we had our own bathroom (which meant we didn't have to share with the one male creature) and the entire floor to ourselves. My bedroommate had her sorority sisters - four or five girls - come visit on more than one occasion, and all of us had family come to stay. When other people from our program came for parties or to hang, they'd always always always comment on our relative palace of an apartment.

All of this is to say two things: ONE we were not high maintenance people, and TWO it was a big apartment. Even with some uncomfortable roommate dynamic, even with visiting significant others and even with sometimes huge groups of people - it was big enough to accommodate. We were cool. It never felt small.

Until.

My bedroommate, let's call her Alice, asked me one day if it was okay that one of her teammates crashed for a few nights. Evidently she'd had to leave our program for a few weeks because of some family stuff, and now she was back in the city and needed a place to stay. Of course I didn't even blink an eye. We regularly hosted hordes of travelers and - as I've said ad nauseum - we had the room to spare. I also assumed (FORESHADOWING, you know what happens when one assumes!) that anyone else in our program would at the very least not go through my shit. Third, I was probably (definitely) the most anal retentive of all the roommates despite the fact that I smoked out of the upstairs window and I was actively trying to go with proverbial flows.

So she came.

So. She. Came.

She really was just awful in a way that you have to experience to understand. I'm trying to write this quickly right before bed and Diego is doing that thing to my back with his feet that he does when he wants attention, so I apologize for this in advance: It's really more like "ten minutes of furious typing of nonsense before I pass the fuck out on this keyboard" than it is anything like an xoJane article. Although.

The quick version, so I can write something today and not have to add this challenge to my list of utter failures: One day Alice and I were hanging out in the room next to our bedroom, the other one we had to ourselves. Alice was putting laundry away and listening to The Office, which I was watching on my tiny pink laptop while I sat on the floor and smoked out the window. We weren't, like, actively hanging out. You know? Just existing in the same space, laughing at Dwight. Like people do.

The other girl, a fake name for whom I cannot think because I can't come up with one weird enough so I'll just continue to call her The Other Girl, came in from wherever she was before. Probably not looking for her own apartment or taking a shower, though. Probably definitely not either one of those things. She immediately opened up Alice's laptop and began playing songs for us and discussing those songs in earnest. Then she started showing us all the things in her Amazon cart, and wanted to know our delivery address for THE THINGS SHE WAS BUYING INSTEAD OF A PLACE TO LIVE. Also, I could see her entire vagina because she was sitting cross-legged on our couch with no underwear on.

Alice and I glanced at each other, Alice probably trying to gauge my level of irritation because I was an established antisocial curmudgeon but also because we both needed to confirm the spectacle that was happening in front of us.

A few days later was my twenty-third birthday and I spent the night imbibing in fancy cocktails and hookahs and other birthday delights. In the morning I dragged my bloated deadweight past the nice churchgoing ladies in West Harlem toward the train, and the only thing that kept me from stabbing myself in the heart with one of my high heels on the way home was the thought of my giant bed and more episodes of the Office lulling me into a sweet, hungover sleep.

Only when I got home, The Other Girl was in my bed. Not on the sofa bed that we'd generously offered her, and not on Alice's futon. My bed. My big comfy Queen-sized princess bed that the angels personally delivered from heaven and that I didn't even like people to look at for too long.

That's not really true, I only said that for dramatic emphasis. Actually I had friends sleep with me a lot, and I offered it to Alice & family whenever I went home for the weekend. But generally those people all showered, and also, I invited them.

I'm really tired right now. It's only 9:38PM. It's all these antihistamines - are anyone else's allergies a nightmare this year? I swear to Aslan I have never had allergies before in my life and now all of a sudden I'm a person who buys boxes of tissues. I feel the same way about boxes of tissues as I feel about concealer - it's toilet paper/foundation in different packaging, guys. Come on. COME ON.

Anyway, to wrap this up: When I walked into my bedroom and asked her politely if I might sleep in my own bed, she said, "I just need ten more minutes to really wake up." Obviously I was in too delicate a state to deal with her, so I set up camp on the couch in the next room. At which point she finally did get out of my bed, and into my roommate's, where she proceeded to have a two-hour long conversation at the top of her lungs about something violent and horrible that I've blacked out the details of.

And then she ordered Indian food and fell asleep again while the smell of leftover curry made me reconsider stabbing myself to death with my shoes.

Um, oh yeah. The reason she finally left was not that we slowly lost the ability to pretend we could stand her even a little bit. It was because we never turned on the heat. One night she asked if she could sleep with one of us in one of our beds, and we both said no (still politely, our goddamn mothers having raised us and all.) Alice weakly offered her another blanket, but by then The Other Girl was already huffily gathering up her belongings (none of which were underwear) and storming off to some other sucker's apartment.

So this is actually a story about how being frugal can save your life, or at least the upholstery on your sofa.