by Eby Lane

Created on: March 08, 2009

I never knew insomnia until I learned what it was like to have a roommate. The college I went to did not have dorms, so the school often rented apartments near the school then leased the to the students. My first suite mates came with their own set of headaches, one kept on the phone with her boyfriend at all hours of the night, while the other would stay up all night with the television at high volume. The only sleep I got was under the help of earplugs and sleeping pills. The TV addict insisted on getting cable for the suite, then demanded that we all pitch in for it. Being that I had no job and could barely pay to eat, I declined. I kept in my room and stayed away from the living room and its extremely loud television, yet the girl still demanded my portion of the cable bill.

The other roommate arranged to move in with a group of boys in a townhouse even closer to the school, and I jumped on it without hesitation. She seemed like a good girl, kept to herself and her fiance over the phone. We'd be sharing a room together, the boys would leave us alone, and you were only responsible for what you used. Sounded great to me. So, we packed are belongings and left. The last we heard of our loud suite mate came when she recruited five of her cousins to demand money due her, but our new roommates talked her into letting it go.

So there was peace and quiet...for two weeks. Then my roommate started to bring home boys, boys who weren't her boyfriend. I would wake up to the sounds of two people being intimate in the bed near mine. Needless to say, they were not trying their best to keep it down. Running out of the room to make an uncomfortable place to sleep, my roommate came down the steps. She was flushed and sweaty, but not an once of guilt on her face. I could hardly look at her as I tried to calmly ask her not to take my sleeping form as an okay to me being present for her one night stands. It wasn't until her one night stand started to come over to eat our food and use our telephone when she wasn't there that she was evicted from the house.

When she moved out, a close friend moved in. I was glad, because I did not know how I was going to manage to live with 4 men, one who was manic depressive and wanted nothing but to win my affections, another who did tricky things with the house accounting and managed to charge me double than everyone else in the house, another who could not clean after himself and could not do anything without leaving a collasal mess, and one who sold marijuana in the basement. I had an ally, until I learned that none of the men in the house liked her, and she fought with them constantly. She was worse at cleanliness than my one roommate, and went shopping instead of paying her share of the rent. Every night she wanted to get drunk or go to the club, if she stayed at home there would be a self-inflicted crisis to whether by the end of the night.

I knew it was time to move when the only time I could sleep were on the weekends when I drove 70 miles to sleep at my parents' house.

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