I have heard some horrible stories about roommates like, "my roommate wears my clothes," or "my roommate sets their alarm at 5 a.m. even on weekends or when they're not in the room." My first three years I got to choose who I wanted to live with. We were all friends, and everything was good between the four of us until one person in our group decided to go crazy and we needed a new person. However, this time I did not get a say into who got to live with us. The school did, since we were all living on campus.
There was one point my other two roommates and I thought we could choose someone, and we did a whole interview and everything with the girl (we can be extra sometimes). But that quickly went out the window when the school picked someone instead of the girl we originally picked.
At that moment I was kind of freaking out. What if the person I got was dirty? I did have to share a bathroom with the girl… What if she has sex every night with all kinds of people coming in and out of our dorm? Those walls are super thin! One time one of my roommates heard me sneeze from my room and texted me bless you. I did not want to deal with hearing people have sex while I am trying to sleep and wake up early for my morning classes.
During the summer, my roommates and I were really trying to find out information on this new girl. We tried googling her and searching for social media pages. All we found was her Facebook page with an old picture of her and her major. (I told you, we can be extra sometimes).
Since there was not much for us to go on, we just thought of worse case scenarios and how we would react in them. We would say things like if she stole our food, we would just have to shave all her hair off. That felt like a good enough compromise to us.
As the summer flew by, the anticipation was killing me. I was so nervous because I did not want to deal with another crazy roommate again. I just wanted this year to go by smoothly without any issues.
On move in day, as I was coming back from my millionth time of running back and forth to my car and the dorm, I saw her.
The first thing I noticed was that she definitely looked older than her Facebook picture, which was to be expected. The second thing was that she looked slightly nervous. This immediately relaxed me because I realized she was just as scared of us as we were of her!
As time went by, I found out how awesome of a person she was. She is not only a great friend, but she is not like any of the worst-case scenarios I made up in my head.
This time I was one of the lucky ones.
Cover Image Credit: Photo by room.422 from Instagram