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Jan. 4, 2016
I was so excited to have a roommate in college.F from first impressions alone, Edna seemed great. But we’re a quarter in, and I’m requesting to move to a single, though I’d settle for a double or forced triple or anything at all with a bed that’s away from my current roommate. It’s nothing personal though! I can’t stress that enough.
Edna and I wrote to each other over Facebook a few times over the summer, and we seemed to have lots in common.: we were both planning to be pre-meds and we both wanted to study abroad in Paris. It seemed like we were going to get along great. On move-in day we were shocked to discover we even had the same bedding! On our first night, she seemed a little homesick and was talking about her family a lot, so I sat down to just talk it out and get to know her. Things were looking better and we were joking around a littleot, and I got to chatting about my family, too. I casually mentioned that my parents got divorced when I was in third grade, and that’s when everything changed.
The previously bubbly and conversational Edna looked at me like a deer in the headlights and stammered, “Your… your parents are divorced?” She had more fear in her eyes than any creature I’d ever seen before. I calmly reassured her that it was fine – it’s probably better that they’re separated, they get along and they’re friendly now, we still have birthday dinners together, etc. Nothing seemed to placate her extreme concern, and she fell asleep twitching.
I passed it off as a littlebizarre first-day-of-college nerves, and decided to start anew the next day. Everything went fine! A blank slate was what we both needed. I almost forgot about the incident, until a month later I noticed a few post-it notes stuck on my desk. They all had peppy handwritten messages on them, like “Your parents were married but aren’t anymore!”, “Your mom and your dad live in different houses!”, and “You have two Christmases!” Edna smiled silently and nodded encouragingly on her bed while I slowly read them and placed them in the recycling bin.
That’s when the sleep-talking started. All through the night she’d unconsciously shout phrases like “yYour parents still love each other but not in a marital way” and “tTheir separation had been discussed for a long time and they both still love you.” While admittedly slightly comforting, the yelling made it very difficult for me to stay asleep, and I found that it disturbed my academic performance. The worst was when Edna started sleepwalking, too and sleep-talking at once, She once climbed and walked right into my bed, with me, and whispered, “You spent an equal amount of time living with both your parents, alternating weeks.”
I talked to my RAs about this for a while, who were calm and cool and suggested I just confront her about it, but casually. I planned to, but on the day I was finally going to ask her to be more mindful, I walked into the room and it looked like a detective’s office: she had hundreds of photos of both of my parents taped around the walls, a few photos of them together, maps to both of their homes, and the actual legal files from their attorneys and the courthouse, all connected with pins and twine. She was sitting on the bed listening to phone recordings of my parents arguing from fifteen years ago and she was utterly beaming. I made eye contact with Edna and she just stared, almost lifeless, and said, “The cool thing was that you got to decorate two different bedrooms. And again, both your parents love you so much,” before going back to sketching a disturbingly life-like profile of our family therapist.
So yeah, I kind of want to switch rooms. Also, if there’s any way I can actually get two rooms, that would be awesome. I am kind of used to having two room.Mostly because of the sleep-talking thing, it’s just really hard to tune out and I don’t want any more trouble falling asleep. And I am VERY used to having two rooms.
