Imagine a hellscape in which the rigid borders of open suitcases lie like vipers under a quilt of laundry. Only God in Heaven knows which of these clothes are dirty and which are clean. The only certain thing in this cabinet of horror is that any visitor is sure to step on the hard casing on luggage or, if he is unlucky, a spoon still sticky with lentil soup.
This is the war-zone to which I subject myself during the 2014 Summer Term. I thought it would be fun to live in a run-down JPA rambler with my good friend (I will call her X) for four weeks; it was cheap, it was within sprinting distance of a bus stop, and I was excited to live a bohemian life with my female counterpart. But nothing — not even 30-hours of mandatory National-Honor-Society trash collection — could prepare me for this cohabitation.
Of course, there were signs, just as rounds of tremors portend a seismic catastrophe. I had spent the week before finals in her room, picking up pieces of garbage and loose change off the floor and putting the garbage in the garbage can and the coins in my pocket (I figured it was a tax, a Catholic-esque indulgence for living a life of filth). I should have read the clues, I should have listened when she said she drank everything from one mug and cut tough meat with the edge of a spoon. Why, O Archangel Michael, patron saint of brooms and dustpans, why did I not listen to the harbinger of doom while I still had time?
We moved in one May night. Her stuff, which we drove from Brown, was tossed helter-skelter in the living room, since the previous tenant was staying one more night and we couldn’t fully move in yet. Little did I know that this was, in X’s mind, the final step; the majority of those objects would remain where they were so absentmindedly stationed until I, the glutton for punishment, tidied them in anticipation for a dinner party. Of course, one does not consider this, just as a newlywed on her honeymoon cannot see the boor her husband will become in ten years’ time.
An important detail to note: This friend of mine kept three fish in one tank. Of course, they died one by one, in protest, I imagine, to the blank walls and disorganized cosmetic boxes over which they looked. By the second week I too wished I could will myself into death as I waited in the living room for a half-hour while she got ready to run errands, or surveyed the cutting-board (which swam with ants the night after she cut a mango), or discovered my smoked salmon with X’s claw-marks torn into the plastic wrapping. Oh, death was welcome in that house, and I, the level-headed roommate, was ready to turn belly-up.
I commiserated with the turn-of–the-century missionaries lost in the Congo.
Looking back, it was not so bleak a situation as I made it out to be. Her being so laissez-faire provided me the opportunity to dip my fingers in the wild side. I, too, indulged my vices, and ate from a bag of expensive chocolates, taking shots of absinthe and washing it down with peanut butter from a spoon which, moments before, had spread mayonnaise on a sandwich. I looked to her for instruction in these matters; hers was the environment where mess didn’t matter, where I could cut brie with a hunting knife and clean it with my tongue, where, when we ran out of tonic, straight gin and lime juice sufficed. We led, in the latter weeks, the life of a newlywed couple, rife with love and squalor. We ate lentils from the same can and she called ahead to bookstores downtown to find editions I wanted, unprompted. Her style of life, whatever crossover between monastery and pigsty, turned out to be not just a less refined version of my own life, but a valid alternative. I don’t see myself submitting to her lifestyle anytime soon (I like my clothes-washing, lint-rolling, calendar-keeping self too much for that) I did learn to respect her. So while I fumed at the sink, scraping off soup which stuck to our single solitary spoon like leprosy, part of me (begrudgingly) thanked Saint Jerome, the patron saint of garbage, for sending me his angel.
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