A Letter To My New Roommate Heather

This is a letter that I wrote when I was transferring to Columbia College Chicago, after I received that little piece of paper in the mail that gives you the names and numbers of your new roommates. At Columbia I had three roommates, not just one, as we shared a large apartment two-bedroom that was nothing like a normal dorm room at all (it had a stove, a full-sized fridge, and a dishwasher!). For some reason the name "Heather" stood out and I was compelled to write this letter:

"Dear Heather,

Hey Heath. I just wanted to write and say that I have been thinking about it, and I’m not sure that we’re going to make good roommates at all. My idea of a good roommate is someone that you can sit around in your underwear with and eat, like, raw cookie dough and mourn the loss of a boyfriend or a parent or a puppy with and watch David Letterman at the same time and tell each other dark secrets after we smoked a joint one of us had hidden in the jewelry box that one of our mothers gave us when we were ten. From the messages I have received from you over Internet email, I have deduced that you’re not the optimum match for me as roommate. I want a roommate with whom I can share deep revelations about life and mostly about sex and about my sexual relationships with men. Usually I have revelations while I look out the window and watch the rain and listen to droopy music and eat a stack of tootsie rolls that I bought at the nearest CMS gas station. I feel like you’re the type of woman who would make a comment about my rolls. You would look down your crooked and probably big and probably ugly nose at me and you would say that tootsie rolls are disgusting or undesirable because of how sticky or clunky or how unlike real chocolate they are because they’re like when a package says ‘cola flavor’ instead of actually being cola or something. And after you made that comment, and after I got sick by looking at you and had to spew a hard chunk of roll on our sure to be dingy carpet, which had we been better friends we could have made light of, but since we’re not just made me feel a lot sicker, I wouldn’t be able to share my revelation with you about the maybe mediocre sex I had with a grad student earlier that afternoon--and then I would be sad, but not like melancholy like how I always get after sex, but because we weren’t as close as I maybe could have been with another roommate, a different girl. Another thing is that I like to do my laundry and then smell the fresh newness of my t-shirts and sometimes when other people’s clothing and shoes (some people wash tennis-shoes) get in with my things, the smells get mixed together and sometimes remind me of smells that I don’t like to be reminded of. It doesn’t happen with every person, but it often happens with people who aren’t good matches with me. And somehow, when I lie awake at night, and when I crawl out my window and go downstairs and listen to my cat cough and then sneak out and ride my bike, and sometimes see another person on a different bike in the empty parking lot behind a Coney Island, and I can smell the special garbage receptacle that is just for grease and also the night air, and I think about how the person on the other bike who is singing church hymns loudly enough for me to hear and I are doing the same thing but we’re on two different life paths, I realize that you are a woman who will never understand how deeply I go. Will you? I hope I’ve been clear enough about the way that I feel, and I also hope that I can get another assignment for a roommate. See you around maybe.

Sincerely,

Lizzy"


Not my best writing, but you can see why I belonged in the Fiction department. And yes, I did send it. Actually, no, I didn't send it. But after Heather and I became friends, I read it to her and she laughed...which means maybe she WAS a good match with me after all.