#(how do two broke guys who live in half a house afford a housekeeper? how did they decide this was a good financial decision?)

[lexalovesbooks]

This description of Queenie in the glossary of the eidolon is pretty funny, considering.

[admhawthorne]

I’m going to post something here that may possibly get me in some level of trouble...

...if my former roommate reads this, but, at this point, I suspect it’s a moot point.

In 2014, I agreed to be my cousin’s roommate so she would be able to afford payments for a new car. She really needed a new vehicle to get from point A to point B, and I figured it’d be fine to be her roommate. Our schedules are extremely different, and the likelihood of us actually seeing each other was really fairly small. It’d be two ships passing in the night, which exactly what I said at the time I agreed to be her roommate.

[VERY long post about why I’ve been less than cordial for two years.]

In fact, I was very clear that we probably wouldn’t see each other much, we wouldn’t eat together, and it would be rare that we would spend down time together, such as playing board games, because of how different our habits are. I made no secret of how I would behave here. This was a roommate arrangement, not a family reunion that went on all year.

We set ground rules. She would let me know if she left for the weekend so I could lock to top lock. She would pay me so I could pay the bills because I had to move in a month before her, so the bills would be in my name, and she wouldn’t bring strangers into the house (aka one night stands.) She would get the master bedroom with the attached bathroom. I would get the covered parking. Her friends could stay the night, and her best friend could wash his clothes at our place. My wife could come when her scheduled allowed. We would clean up after ourselves, take out the trash and put the dishes when needed, and I would hire a housekeeper to come clean once a month or so. My cousin was under no obligation to pay for that service, but it would be nice if she chipped in since the housekeeper would be cleaning the common areas.

It was, from there, a series of bad omens.

We looked around at few different apartments as time came close for me to move. My lease was up a whole month before hers, and, to add to it, I had to give a 60 day notice to my current complex while she only needed to give 30 (as I recall).

Our schedules never worked out to find a place. I kept pushing as it got closer and closer to time for me to put in my intent to my current complex. Finally, it was the weekend in which I had to find a place, and I called her only to find she was in a different state on vacation with a friend of hers. I asked her if she really wanted to roommate with me. If she didn’t, that was fine, but I needed an answer that weekend because, as I’d stated earlier, I needed to have a place lined up by that weekend. She hemmed and hawed and finally said she still wanted to do it and she guessed she’d trust me to pick from the places we’d already looked at.

Why was it so hard to find a place? Well, it couldn’t be further than 20 minutes from her work, it had to fall under X amount of money each month so she could afford it, it had to have two bathrooms, and it had to have a bedroom big enough to hold her king sized platform bed plus her stuff. Her stuff, mind you, is enough to fill up a moving truck twice over and then some.

So, I put down for an apartment that worked under her guidelines. It worked for me, too, because it was also close to my job at that time. A week later, I was offered a FAR better job. That job was an hour to an hour and a half away from this new apartment, depending on traffic. I took the job, of course, which meant I had to eat that commute.

From that point on, it’s just been a series of mini-cluster fucks.

First, there was the issue that not all of her stuff would fit in the new apartment, which she knew, but she thought more could fit in there than could actually fit, so she had to get a bigger storage unit. That eventually became a weird strike against me even though I got rid of all my sitting furniture and had only one box and a table top in the storage closet outside. I donated or otherwise disposed of almost all of my “stored” things to specifically give her as much storage room as possible in this new apartment, which she knew. I never made that a secret.

Then there was the issue that, because I was in the second bedroom with no extra space, my TV and gaming consoles were in the living room, which meant that, when I came home, I would settle in the living room for an hour or two before going to bed. In our agreements before moving in together, she had said this would be fine. She had a TV in her room, so it was no big deal for me to be in the living room when I came home after work or during the weekends. However, after a few months, this arrangement made her uncomfortable; she eventually told me that the apartment didn’t feel like it was hers at all because she didn’t feel comfortable being out in the public spaces. That was apparently my fault somehow, though I never could get her to explain how it was my fault or what I could do to fix it.

Whenever she had someone over and they were in the living room, she would have them scatter as soon as I walked in the door, and I would stop them and point out that I could go somewhere else or do something else instead of being on the TV, but my cousin always blew that off and acted like I was running them out on a rail. I never could get her to explain why she acted that way. Yes, I asked.

She had someone over almost all the time. If it wasn’t her former boyfriend/now BFF, then it was her current boyfriend, or one of her friend girls. There was almost always someone there if she wasn’t out and spending the night with them. If she was out and spending the weekend with them, she almost never would tell me, which broke a part of our agreements prior to moving in together. When asked about it, she’d just shrug say, “Oh, I’m sorry. I forgot to tell you, but I meant to.”

She never cleaned up after her BFF, who would cook and leave a trail of crumbs and god only knows what on and in the oven. She never really cleaned up after herself, either. She’d cook sweets like cakes for her work people, and I’d come into the kitchen to find my hand sticking to the counter tops or confectionery sugar in all the nooks and crevices of the counter tops. Shit would get spilled out in the fridge that I know wouldn’t be mine because I rarely had food in the fridge, and she’d never clean it out. It’d just sit there until I couldn’t take it anymore. I think, in the two years we were living together, she cleaned the fridge out, maybe, twice, and she NEVER offered to help pay for the housekeeper.

I cleaned it out once while she watched, and I literally pulled a tin of cookies from the crisper drawer that were over 5 years old. She had moved them from her old place to the new, and they were that old.

She eventually got a new boyfriend, after going through a dating phase in which she, once again, found ‘the one’ only to have him ghost her. They’d only been talking/dating for three months when that happened, but the world came to an end there for a while.

The new boyfriend is a nice guy. He’s a former Christian cult member, but he’s better now. He is married and divorced with a teenage daughter who has a host of issues (as do we all), but the daughter doesn’t live with him even though he has custody. (It’s a long story, but I actually don’t judge him for this. I understand he’s trying to do what’s right for his daughter.) The man can’t keep a job. He had five in the half a year I’ve known him, and I know that because, two months after they started dating, he was kicked out of his place, thus making him homeless.

In the heat of a Texas July, my cousin decided she would help him find places he could sleep during the day IN HIS CAR so he could make it to his overnight job he had at the time. Let me repeat that in bullet points:

-          Middle of a Texas Summer

-          Homeless boyfriend

-          Help him find places to sleep in his black car

That’s care, isn’t it? I found out about it because I asked her what was wrong with him, and I just couldn’t let it go that she would rather help him sleep in his car and risk arrest for trespassing and/or heatstroke than talk to me (or anyone else for that matter) about finding a solution that would actually help him. It was wrong on so many levels that I had a break in good judgement and told her that, if he paid 200.00 for the month for rent (he wasn’t getting 40 hours for work, so I understood that 200.00 would be a lot but doable and allow him time to save up for move-in costs), he could stay with us until he found a place, but I expected him to find a place in two months’ time.

He never found a place.

He paid the 200.00 for two months, and then offered to pay 250.00 because he realized “it wasn’t right for [him] to be there and only pay 200.00.” To his credit, he did look for a place, but he could never find one he could afford on his own, especially with the upfront costs to move in, so there’s that. Luckily, he/they still had money for multiple concerts at AT&T (Cowboy) Stadium and a few road trips. Isn’t that lucky?

By then, it was September. I decided to let it go. Our lease was up in December, and then I’d be done. It was clear he wasn’t going anywhere. It was also clear that they weren’t doing the dishes. We had a dishwasher. It’s not hard to fill it, run it, and put your dishes up.

There were two of them and one of me, and I had been as vocal as I could be about them cleaning up their messes without lighting smoke signals, so I started hand washing the one or two dishes I made during the course of the day, which didn’t sit well with my cousin, either, especially when I stopped buying soap for the dishwasher.

In August, I found out from a mutual friend that my cousin and I were in a fight over the temperature in the apartment. I literally had no flippin’ clue. A couple of weeks before, my cousin, her boyfriend, and I had dinner together, and I mentioned that I noticed they’d been putting the air on auto, which turns off the fan. They told me that it kept the apartment cooler that way. I told them fine, and I asked them that, if they were going to do that, to please turn the fan on in my room because my cat’s litter box was in my room and, with no air circulation at all and regardless of how clean I keep the box, it would be stifling in my room without some air current. They said they could do that. They did it once, and then, a few weeks later I find out we’re apparently in a “fight” about it. Really?

A week later, I decided to bring it up because, F it all, being in an argument I didn’t even know about was actually pissing me off. I offered solutions to the temperature situation. They were all shot down, and I was told, “[He and I] will figure something out. It’s okay.” So, that issued was solved not at all, but it was yet something else that she didn’t like that I was doing.

By the end of September, my cousin decided to tell me that she “misread” the lease. She thought it was up on December 1, so they’d already found a new place and were moving in the last week of November, but, since she was in the wrong about it and that was on her, she would pay her share of the rent for December “if [I] still wanted [her] to.”

*slow blink*

Naturally, my answer was a strong affirmative on that one. She was going to pay her part of the rent.

I don’t think that sat well with her either.

In fact, there a lot of things that didn’t sit well with her, like the fact I didn’t always talk when she walked into a room, which I didn’t find out until over year into this crap, and not from her but from one of her gentlemen suitors who was on his way out to smoke on our patio and mentioned it as a throwaway line as he stepped outside. She didn’t like me camping out at home during the weekend and “never leaving the apartment,” but she never seemed to take into account that my nearly 3 hour round trip commute during the week meant I had no time for things like watching TV or playing videogames during the week. I guess, when you can drive home from work for lunch and a little siesta and get back on time, you forget other people have a harder time chilling at home during the work week.

Here’s the thing, I don’t think I’m actually allowed to be angry, irritated, or otherwise negative about any of this. She was in a car accident that hurt her back even more than it already was, so she had problems bending over and couldn’t carry much weight, which is why she didn’t do dishes or take the trash out. When her boyfriend moved in, he did take the trash out, but I was feeling no guilt over that because he was paying less than 1/3 of rent/bills. She has mental health issues circling around depression and anxiety, so I’m supposed to be patient with her when she’s having problems talking to me about things that bother her or when she didn’t bother to give me a heads up that a strange man/man in general was in the house and could come out of her bedroom at any point, like when I’m going/coming from the shower because my bathroom was not attached to my bedroom. (Yes, I have a robe. That’s not the point.) She is a self-identified introvert and empath, so I’m supposed to understand that she’d extremely sensitive and be cognizant of that fact so as not to hurt her feelings accidentally.

Right? I’m supposed to just roll with it, and, whenever I think something might be wrong, I should’ve asked her instead of her bringing it up even though it’s a thing bothering her. Right?

I F’ING DID. About once every three months I would ask her if I’d done something or said something that pissed her off, and she never once – NOT ONCE – took the chance to tell me any of the shit that was bothering her.

Not.

One.

Single.

Flippin’.

Time.

The final time I asked her what was going on with her was November about a week before she and her boyfriend moved out, and she said, “Well, nothing except I think you don’t like me anymore.”

I said, “Have I done anything to you to indicate that?”

Her: No

Me: Have I said anything to make you think that?

Her: No

Me: Do have an example that shows why you might feel that way?

Her: No, not really

Me: Have you spoken to me about it at all?

Her: No

Me: Well, if you don’t have anything, then I don’t know what to tell you. I don’t have anything to give you anymore.

Because that was a freakin’ setup. It was too little too late, and I was so tired and so frustrated by then that anything would have been a verbal beat down and extremely accusatory. It would NOT have been productive. If she had given me something, I would have happily addressed it and explained my thought process, but she didn’t. She brought it up and hoped I’d just get after it.

Nope. I only had a few weeks to go by then.

I sent her the final rent/bill cost and forgot that her boyfriend wasn’t paying the 250.00 he’d generously been giving for rent. When I asked her the morning of the day of her move about it, she had apparently built up this whole argument in her head about how her boyfriend had “agreed to be a tenant only until the end of November, and, since this rent was for December and he was no longer a tenant, he did not owe the money,” which made me want to roll my eyes so far back in my head I could see my brain.

I cut her off, told her that was fine so long as she paid me, and I left for work.

Since then, I haven’t said a word to her. I saw her and her boyfriend on Christmas Eve at our grandfather’s house. We said exactly nothing to each other. I gave her a book she mentioned she wanted and a hand blender like one I have that I thought she might like that’s great for sauces and soups. She gave no one anything, or maybe it was just me. Hard to know these days.

You know, in general, I try to do what’s right. I do. It may not be in a gentle way. I’m not a feelings person. I don’t do the empathy thing well. It’s just not my thing. I’ve spent my whole life with chronic pain and clinical depression with the added bonus of generalized anxiety. It’s great. It’s like slamming on the breaks and the gas at the same time while in the middle of a three car pileup. I learned a long time ago that you just have to keep going. You find solutions that work to allow you to keep doing what needs to be done despite whatever ails you. In spite of your physical or mental pain, there’s a point at which you have to go to work, you have to clean up after yourself, and you have do for yourself without expecting anyone to be grateful or excited that you are doing it.

That’s just adult life. It sucks sometimes, but life is hard. My physical and mental issues are not my crutch, and I think that, a lot of the time, they’re my cousin’s, and that frustrates me not because I’m trying to one up her on the ‘oh yeah, mine’s worse’ meter, but because it keeps her from progressing in life, and it keeps the rest of us around her in a constant state of ‘will this be the thing that sets her off?’

She just won’t talk about anything that bothers her and refuses to address problems, and I just can’t do it anymore.

On the tenth anniversary of the death of the woman who raised me, I wanted to go visit her grave, but my cousin’s fuck buddy posted about his new girlfriend on Facebook, and she had a mutual friend call me and ask me to come over to help manager my cousin because she was so distraught, so I did. Looking back, I don’t think I should have. She used to throw actual tantrums when we were children when things weren’t going her way because we were ‘mean to her,’ and I never understood that. She complains about no one understanding her or bothering to remember what is important to her even though she does that for other people because she’s a giver, but people do stuff for her all the time, and they don’t have to.

I don’t think I can be a good person to her anymore. If these past two years have taught me anything, it’s that I was a chump. I hate myself for that. I don’t ever want to feel as stressed out and frustrated about going home as I did these past two years. I am the most unhealthy I have ever been, and it’s because I allowed myself to be that way in order to stay out of the line of sight of my cousin lest I upset her.

It’s stupid. I was stupid. I was so very stupid, and I don’t think we will ever get back to where we were before this mess started. It’s a loss on both sides, and I could make it right by reaching out to her and apologizing for not being sympathetic, understanding, and helpful in her times of need, but the truth is it’s a two way street, and I was the only one reaching out.

It’s her turn.

As childish and selfish and self-centered as that sounds, and I know it’s egotistical, which is wrong, but it’s her turn to be the bigger person and reach out to me. If she really wants the relationship (as she said about a boy who she once wanted to date but didn’t want to ask him out because he should ask her out), she can talk to me.

It’s wrong… I hate myself for that, too, but I feel so much better having that behind me and being alone again.

….maybe I just shouldn’t be around people…