As soon as I heard the door open, I slammed my laptop shut with such panicked speed the only reasonable explanation could be that I had been watching two adults have consensual sex. In fact, I had been watching a fan-made music video for Andrew Jackson Jihad. If you want to reread that and imagine an embarrassed dog going “Woof,” by all means proceed.
Apart her proclivity to have friends over when I want to make ugly sob noises, my roommate is pretty ideal. Our shower isn’t horrifying, I’ve never received a threatening message via Post-it note and it’s only mostly unbearable to walk through her room when I have to pee. Brown College has been described as “aggressively quirky” by at least three separate people but the residential community’s defining feature is the necessity of avoiding eye contact with another human when you’re tracking shower water into her nicely decorated living space.
For the record, having two connected rooms is better than sharing a room and is the main reason why I made my application absolutely shameless. There was a drawing of Karl Marx on my essay about cats and I’m not proud. I’m not proud at all. But I did earn the privilege of seeing the fruits of my roommate’s interior design labors before entering my own room, which has been described as “like an upscale Russian prison cell.” The main piece of décor is the pile of clothes that spurs night terrors when it’s 3 a.m. and the wrinkles in a pair of leggings looks exactly like a face attached to an amorphous cloth body. This phenomenon is called pareidola (many thanks to Wikipedia, both for giving me the answer to “brain seeing faces” and the answer to why I haven’t failed every class.)
After an evening with at least three signs from the universe that everything I would ever do would be a failure, I was ready to throw a pity party. Pity parties are the best kinds of parties, because you get to wallow without having to get your friend drunk enough to listen to you.
Crying is a big event. Around age 13 I decided that crying was lame, a decision that was followed by two years of psychologically rich diary entries. Writing in a diary wasn’t lame; it’s a composition notebook. I was the toughest preteen around, excluding the actually tough preteens, who terrified me. All feelings were garbage nonsense that could just sit inside my chest and take it.
This streak of being cool and outwardly not caring about my Algebra II exam was broken when I saw “The Corpse Bride” and sobbed off my shoplifted mascara in my friend’s basement. It wrecked me. This film is a whimsical animated feature often described as “Not a sad movie, what is wrong with you?” Something about Helena Bonham Carter’s claymation surrogate turning into butterflies (they represent freedom. She just wanted to be free and she turned into butterflies and flew up to the moonlight because you don’t get moonlight in the underworld) struck a chord in my heart. My friend patiently listened to me bawl “BUTTERFLIES” into her mom’s decorative pillow until the credits, when she left to make popcorn. As it turned out, growing up to be a lady in a motorcycle jacket wasn’t an option. I’d have to learn to be a human girl.
I don’t know how to be a human girl. Thirteen-year-old me thought crying was gross for emotional reasons, and I still think crying totally is gross, but for snot reasons. This is called maturing into a self-actualized person. In the no-cry zone, my idea of what weeping was mostly based on music videos where the singer gets shot. With crying, I had hoped I would look like a French girl from a ‘60s movie: with a single tear sliding down my French cheek, instead of a bowl of raw mussels. If the English language is still evolving, I’d like to suggest we remove the term “ugly crying” from our vernacular, as it implies there are people who are attractive when they cry. Furthermore, if attractive criers exist, I suggest a witch-hunt.
With my roommate and her compatriots in the next room, having the type of full-fledged, Great Gatsby-style pity party I yearned for wasn’t an option. The big tree outside of Brown was private enough and made me feel enough like a literary character to draw my aching soul to its foliage. One of the big roots made an adequate sitting space and I would have remained there instead of clambering up the branches like a very sad squirrel if a group of girls singing “The Time Warp” hadn’t passed. These madcap youths have definitely sung tunes from “Rocky Horror Picture Show” in the past and I briefly considered emerging from the tree leaves like a spooky old forest witch to chastise them for waking people up at 2 a.m. with their quirky antics. I was awake at that 2 a.m. but, other people probably weren’t. When I say “considered,” I mean “didn’t really consider.”
Perched on a branch, it felt right. Drunk people passed, unaware of my preternatural ability to silently cry without shaking enough to fall off my roost. Thirteen-year-old me would have been disgusted, but 13-year-old me had some seriously rank Sun-In highlights and would be in no place to judge.
Charlotte Raskovich is a humor columnist for The Cavalier Daily.
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