2/7/2011 - a sort of Three's Company arrangement. . .

Not counting boyfriends, I have lived without roommates for most of my adult life.   After a disastrous stint during my second year of college where I lived with another gay guy, a lesbian, and a bisexual girl dating a questionable straight boy, I decided that roommates just weren’t my thing.  When people asked if I got lonely living by myself, my answer was always the same: if I wanted to see friends, I could always go out and find them.

The unspoken part of that answer: often, I preferred to just stay at home and be by myself anyway.  While I envy people who have made a familial unit out of their roommate situation, established a sort of Three’s Company arrangement for themselves, I know that it would only be good for me in theory.  Eventually, I would dread coming home to find my roommate there, feel the need to socialize, be civil, not be able to just come home, shuck my clothes wherever they may fall and be the slobbish animal that I am.

However, when Sam and I moved into our current place, we inadvertently found ourselves with a different kind of roommate in Greg, our third-floor neighbor.  His footsteps thud through our ceiling like a subwoofer, and even after we renovated it with some soundproofing, we can still hear faint vibrations on good days, small detonations on others.  I think we have both come to accept the fact that it is the hazard of condo-living and not being in the penthouse, but it can still be annoying.

Last night was the first night I slept in the place by myself without Sam, who was away on a business trip.  You’d think that I would revel in having the place to myself, bask in the nostalgia of those ‘good ol’ days’ when I could make a sty of the place without consequence (and believe me, when Sam is home, there are definitely consequences).

Instead, after walking into an empty house after dinner at the local taqueria, I found myself unnerved, jittery.  I immediately went upstairs and turned on all the lights, looked behind the closet door, and opened the shower curtain.  I could not tell you what I was looking for exactly, but had I found it, I certainly would have given my vocal cords, waiting vigilantly, the workout of their lives.

Now, of all the years I’ve lived alone, in all those different apartments, including one I’m fairly certain to this day was haunted, I have never once felt irrationally scared.  Outside of spiders, I’m not really scared of anything, certainly nothing supernatural.

But I had to will myself to go take a shower last night, be closed off to the rest of the house by a curtain I could not see through.  Eventually, I did, of course, but I was just shy of panicked.  I washed my face so fast that I later found a patch of soap left unrinsed by my right ear.  I had not wanted to close my eyes for fear of what I might see when I reopened them. 

What that would be, I had no clue.  Like I said, it was completely irrational, and utterly emasculating.  Which is saying something when there wasn’t much masculinity to slough off in the first place.

Around 9:30, as I watched Pretty Woman and wondered how I could turn off all the lights and climb the stairs without freaking myself out, I heard those familiar footsteps from Greg, like a thumping car stereo moving across the street.  It sounded like he walked around to his kitchen, went to the bathroom, then trod upstairs. 

Where I normally would do my best to tune it out (which I have gotten pretty good at), I welcomed it.  I sat there and listened to it, and slowly, every tremor of fear disappeared to the point where I couldn’t even remember what I had been so afraid of in the first place.  Greg’s home, yay!

I had never been so grateful for poor soundproofing in my life.