The roommate from Hell
What did you do to deserve this?
Art by Mikayla Croucher
Your roommate. Maybe they’re a long time friend, a rando who was also looking for a place to stay, or you have a distant relationship with. The context changes, but you’re now living closer with this person than you have with anyone else. Perhaps you’ve never had a roommate, but you’ve heard of them, or rather, heard the horror stories.
Is this person your roommate? Or are they karmic balance for something terrible you did in a past life? Either way, this has to be intentional. I mean, they butter their bread by rubbing the bread on the butter stick. How about the fact that they leave just enough orange juice in the jug to coat the bottom of a glass, and decide “Whelp, there’s someone else in this household, back in the fridge it goes!”
Clean the dishes you ask? But “They’re being soaked,” they say! They’ll get to them later! So quit nagging and clean them when you need them.
Want to take out the trash? More like a trash pile that has been overflowing for a week now. Have a chore list to try and divvy-up responsibilities? Sure, see how long that lasts, especially since they keep ‘forgetting’ it’s their turn to clean the toilet… after taco night.
And when it comes to toilets, “let it mellow” is only for #1! And would it kill them to put the toilet seat down? Those two in combination are a recipe for a sudden dive and a traumatising, fecal-related incident.
On the note of bathrooms, toothpaste. They swear they don’t touch your stuff, but you’ve been staring at their flattened and squeezed toothpaste roll for a month now, and it hasn’t moved.
You even did a test. You put one of their many hair trimmings that they refuse to clean up on the tube, specifically on top of the ‘T’ in the label, and unless you accidentally super glued it, that thing hasn’t moved. And their toenail clippings, it almost seems like they go everywhere but the trash bin.
I hope you and your roomate have the same taste in music, because the concept of headphones seems to be completely beyond them. But hey, at least they figured out how to use their Bluetooth speaker!
Oh, and speaking of sound disturbances, isn’t it fascinating that their alarm goes off at 6:00 am every morning, only to get snoozed constantly until they actually get out of bed at 8:00 am? What’s their reasoning behind that process? All you know is that you have been conditioned to wake up at 6:00 am, and just stare angrily at the ceiling until they finally shut it off. You’ve got evening classes after all, that means you get to sleep in.
But hey, it’s only the first few months of your two year lease. I’m sure they’ll get better over time as you both adjust to living with someone else.
Right?
