Like most lesbians my ex and I were living together when we broke up. I'm fortunate enough that our split was super amicable (unlike most lesbians) but when all was said and doneskies I found myself living in a two bedroom house I could not afford on my own. Or at all really since I'm currently waaay under-employed. I ran into an old college friend a few weeks after the break up and in catching up it came out that she was wanting to move and I was in need of someone to pay half the rent. So she moved in.
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| Use only on dreadlocks. Not for use by Angela. |
Going from living with a partner to living with a roommate has been a very interesting transition for me. But that's a different post. Also, my roommate does not like to be called a roommate. She astutely explained to me that we do not share a room. We share a house. So according to her we're housemates. And I can jive with that. This housemate of mine is from Nigeria originally, and lived in London for a good long while. This accounts for her nuanced terminological insistence. It also accounts for why I can't steal many of her bathroom products, try as I might. Despite attending the University of North Texas in Denton-aka Land of 36,000 liberal arts hippies, housemate has never lived with another person before. I on the other hand have had upwards of 6 to 7 rotating guys-on-couch at any given college dwelling. So my commune background has prepared me for almost every adventure in shared living spaces. But no previous living situation could have prepared me for her strangest quirk- the external monologue.
Most people are familiar with the term “internal monologue” and this is exactly like that, except her inner-voice does not manifest inside her head. She speaks her running monologue. I'm not talking like she laughs out loud to a particularly funny episode of Grey's Anatomy- I'm talking a running narrative of anything that pops into her brain. I have been seated across from her in a neighborhood establishment for a few hours now escaping cabin fever during the snowpocalypse today, tying to write and it's been im-fucking-possible. I tried to write about self vs. nature. I tried to write about the ridiculously over-emphasized notion of “passion”. Bupkis. Nothing can drown out her solo conversation. So, I listened. And then it infected me so deeply that I could not switch it off until I wrote about it. So, here's hoping I have exorcised my Nigerian external monologue observations.
Keep it warm out there Dallas!
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| This could have been my house in college. I was too purple hazed to remember exactly what the joint looked like. |
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