My Roommate

I started out in Portugal renting a room in the home of dear old friends who turned out to have become late-stage alcoholics. They'd randomly transform from delightful company to strangling monsters, often flipping several times per day. To them, I appeared to be scrambled the other way, either flinching needlessly like some daffy paranoid in the presence of dear old friends or else baffling them with my positive attitude when they and I were plainly mortal enemies. Gaslit in both directions!

A few weeks in, I was infected by a parasite, losing 30 pounds and becoming so chronically dehydrated that I developed tons of tiny kidney stones. Then I sprained my ankle, permanently over-stretching the ligament so I'd lapse into excruciating pain while walking even months later. Meanwhile, I was viewing a succession of depressing apartments with the stupidest, most arrogantly callous and incompetent realtor on god's green earth, while otherwise spending my time hunkered down on a park bench or in my car, avoiding the boozy chaos. Eventually, in desperation, I moved into temporary quarters which turned out to be next to a marble factory which fired up its stone-cutting machine at 7:30am, sending plumes of caustic rock dust through every wall crack in my rattling cheap apartment, reactivating my long-dormant asthma.

Hang in there; this ends happily.

Finally, I found the perfect apartment, but it was obscenely overpriced. After a series of exasperating and shady realtor blunders and collusions, I faced a choice: continue hunting with the unbearable broker with my wrecked ankle and GI tract and tubercular cough, or else pay the insane asking price to score the perfect apartment in which I could finally unwind and recover.

With gritted teeth, I paid. But then myriad hidden issues with the place kept arising, forcing me to scramble to fix it all in a strange city where I didn't speak the language.

At long last, I reached a position of comfort, ready to begin recovery. And at that life-affirming moment of golden sunshine beaming between clouds, I met my roommate.

But I don't have a roommate.

I'd walked past my office, and, with peripheral vision, noticed someone sitting in my desk chair. I turned my head, and...nothing. But I'd definitely seen and felt someone there.

I am not a ghost-seeing kind of dude, nor am I prone to hallucination. And while the events described above were painful, I was in sound mind because I don't create stress for myself. I just move dutifully forward like an ant, picking up a grain of sand and putting it over there, ad infinitum.

Since I wasn't losing my mind, this was either a cognitive glitch due to an unfamiliar setting, or some sort of weird ghost thing or whatever. Six of one, an infinitesimal speck of the other. I wasn't about to commit to the ghost proposition, but, lingering in problem-solving mode, I surveyed the remote possibility as another potential snag to preempt. So I awkwardly addressed my hypothetical new roommate:

Look, I don't believe in ghosts. I feel like an idiot right now. But if I'm sharing this apartment with, uh, someone/something, know that I wish you well, and have no problem with you hanging around, and do let me know if you need anything. But I have one request: try not to scare me. I've been through quite a lot, and really need to feel comfortable here. So please make some effort not to scare me, ok?

It seemed prudent. Or at least as prudent as one can feel while standing alone in an apartment bargaining with insentient walls and furniture.

There have been subsequent glimmerings, but they've filled me with hope. Because they only happen when I move unexpectedly. Coming home early, swinging open a door suddenly after a long silence, that sort of thing. At such moments I occasionally perceive a scurrying to get out of my way. Nothing mischievous. More alertly diligent. I sense good intentions. And a benevolent ghost might be better than no ghost at all. I'll take benevolence wherever I find it, even if it's imaginary (in my way of seeing, it's all imaginary, with our role to stoically play through, come what may).

One morning, I was exasperated by the disappearance of my eye drops from my night table. I may have moaned out loud about the goddamn eye drops. And that night, when I went to bed, they were waiting for me on the night table.

My mind went click-click-click. Roommate. Imaginary. Benevolent. I sighed, registered resigned appreciation (whatever the explanation), and treated my eyes to double drops.

Next morning, the eye drops were gone again. I mumbled aloud "Are you just messing with me?" in a playful tone. By nightfall, they'd returned, just in time for bed time.

None of this felt scary. Playful benevolence, real or projected, is never scary. So I considered playing along with the chummy game. Hide the eye drops. See if roommate can find them. But, wait. Perhaps I'd already done exactly that. Maybe I'd been hiding the eye drops all this time and simply forgot. Maybe I'm the ghost.

I don't think so. I'm not descending into senility quite yet. My stomach's vastly better (I healed it like this), I can reset my ankles via a swift sequence of foot movements, my apartment is awesome, I'm making non-surgical yoga progress with my crippled shoulder, and in a few years my apartment may be worth 90% of what I paid for it. I'm neither stressed nor freaked out, and am at peace with the roommate situation. So, no, I'm not fracturing under pressure.

Of course I recognize that the benevolence I'm sensing is projected by my own shifting, healing internal psychic situation. Humans live to project stories expressing their inner states. In fact, that's the whole earthly ballgame. So, given that I'm getting along pretty well with roommate for now, I file it, nonchalantly, under "ain't broken/no need to fix."

As I once wrote:

Human beings spend their lives in conflict with imaginary people: mentally rearguing old arguments, worrying about faceless attackers and detractors, reliving bygone humiliations, and generally using our imaginations to make our lives a living hell.

That's considered "normal", but using the same faculty in positive ways to help us cope seems, for some bizarre reason, childish and loopy.