Roxanna Andrade

I’m convinced my roommate wants me to stop showering. And stop eating and drinking. I’m also convinced she wants to cut off the water supply to my room and program the thermostat to run the air conditioning in winter.

Dear reader, you have to believe me. I promise I’m not crazy — I just haven’t slept in four days because I know she comes in my room at night and hovers over the right side of the bed (might I add, that’s the side I f*cking sleep on!) — I’m sure of it. By the way, I know it’s not advertised, but drinking six cups of the Dunkin Donuts French Vanilla blend in six hours makes you sweat like crazy, and it also makes you invincible. I ran one-fourth of a 5k on the treadmill.I’ve never even run before. Although I may need to start training to run away from my roommate. Even though she’s carrying out a silent war of attrition to finish me off, who knows if she’ll take to the public city streets and chase me down the New Haven Green.

Yesterday, she said she made broccoli to share, but I think she infused the broccoli stems with sulfur hexafluoride — reverse helium. And while that can’t kill me, she can. Also reverse helium can really f*ck with your love life which might be worse than dying.

I don’t hate my roommate, but I have my list of grievances. The first is that I’m positive she wants to kill my family. And the prospect of my family being dead didn’t bother me at first, but after six cups of that Vanilla coffee, it was just eating away at me, so I brainstormed all of her potential motives and identified my top three.

When you rent an apartment, there’s this thing you have to pay called “utilities.” It’s like Monopoly, except it’s nothing like Monopoly. In real life, you don’t get a card that’s aesthetically black and white (sometimes with a twinge of yellow); Instead, you’re implicated in a giant and very mysterious government pyramid scheme that steals your money. No one actually knows what “utilities” is or how to measure it, but we all pretend like we do so we can seem like cool, independent adults. I also am especially confused about this “utilities” business because my dad is paying for it. He’s always complaining about it too. Anyways, we “split” “utilities.” I think that means we pay the same amount of money for the weird government shit, but it could also mean that we’re literally splitting everything in half and then maybe our apartment will burn down to the ground or something. If this happens, and my family’s dead, I’ll have nowhere to go, and she’ll have fully attrited me. Anyways, I think she’s mad about the “utilities” and wants me to do all the “utilities” because she’s anti-government. Maybe she’s a libertarian. But I also think she gets off to Jill Stein. She’s very confusing.

Another possible explanation is that she doesn’t like my family because they are related to me, and she doesn’t like me because one time I increased the thermostat to 60 degrees instead of keeping it at 59. I only did it because I caught pneumonia after getting laryngitis and the flu two weeks in a row. But she yelled at me, and I never touched it again because she is going to kill me and my family. 

And this is highly unlikely, but a distant cousin of mine who may be a part of the mob came to visit, and she wasn’t very happy about it. I think this might have something to do with the “utilities” because my cousin used the “utilities” — lots of water and lots of light — and now the government is going to target us.

There is a hole in my roommate’s room. Either that or she just talks really loud. I haven’t left my bedroom yet, so I don’t know what the rest of our apartment looks like, but I think she carved a hole in the wall to hear everything I say because she hasn’t figured out the whole wiretapping thing yet. I also think she wants to be able to easily and accurately fire her AK-47 at my door in case I type too loudly on my keyboard. She’s from Florida.

The water in the shower dries out my hair, and I know it’s her fault. I’m scared to do the dishes because if the shower water is so bad, what will the sink water do to my hands? Probably give me eczema, or elephantiasis, on the spot.

I can’t take out the trash either. And while I can’t confirm yet (because I’ve never taken out the trash), I know she cuts little slits in the bottom of the trash bags, waiting for me to pick it up, so the leftover hot coffee grounds from the filters burn off my toes.

Also, I take it back. She’s learned how to wiretap. Or tap something. I don’t know. The internet is down. Maybe she knows I’m writing this for the three-fourths of a person who will read it when it’s published. I was trying to look up if you could transmit Omicron through radiators in the walls (because I’m convinced she’s up to something), and the WHO website says it’s on a maintenance break. I know that’s a lie, and also impossible, because people are dying. The world doesn’t stop for anyone. Neither does health. And neither do organizations.

Okay anyways, can anyone relate to this? As soon as my internet comes back, I’m going to create a subgroup on Reddit for people who know their roommates want to kill them but have no proof because their roommate is killing them off very, very slowly and inconspicuously. There will be a very minimal vetting process. Just come prepared to explain what “utilities” is. Also make sure you have a remarkable addiction of some sort. Whether it’s coffee or cocaine, we value diverse experiences of paranoia — however you’ve acquired it. Click here to join.