No Hope

I tried to run away from my new roommate.

It showed me what it really was. It revealed itself to me, and took me into its bedroom, as I was heading out the door. I don't know how it knew that I was running, but it did.

I know now that I will never escape. Whatever monster masqueraded as Brian to begin with has claimed me, and it has power that no one on Earth could possibly fathom without experiencing it firsthand. Wherever I go, it will find me. It will cause some intrusion to occur, and the intrusion will lead me back to it, and it will have power over me until the end of time.

It showed all of this to me, and I was glad for it, because it still made me see myself as its bride. But now I know the truth. It does not care for me. It is as unfeeling as the wind, which blows us all one direction or another without concern for our plans or our feelings.

The creature that has taken over my life will use me, again and again and again and again, as a host for its children. I don't know what it intends to do beyond that, and I don't think I want to.

I only have this blog, the last place where it has no power over me and my thoughts.

I have no hope left of escape.

Something Unexplainable

My new roommate cannot possibly be human.

I don't know what's going on anymore. Everything I know about the world has been twisted into something horrible, something dangerous. Brian, whatever he is, has turned the world against me and has made himself the only thing stable in my entire life.

Since I discovered my own pregnancy, things have gotten exponentially worse for me, in every way possible. When I leave the house, people treat me with scorn and hostility, as though I am someone to be avoided. Spyrian Mobile fired me for "improper conduct" and my bank accounts have frozen mysteriously. Every inquiry I've made to try and understand why has been fruitless. It's as though my existence has been made undesirable to the entire world. I know now that this must be Brian's doing, but I can not explain how or why he did this to me.

Just the other day someone spit at me in public for no reason.

Whenever I try to buy myself food, anywhere, something always goes wrong.

I can't show my face in public without being sneered and scowled at.

The world has become a terrifying place, and my only retreat, my apartment, I share with a roommate who I know cannot possibly be human. Every facet of my life has been invaded by something, somewhere, and I cannot find an escape from any of this. In Brian's presence, I find myself placated, unable to do the things I would normally do; I am content with him, due to whatever mind control he exerts over me when we are together.

It wasn't hard to realize that something was terribly amiss with Brian once I realized he had been hypnotizing me for some time. The fear that consumed me once this revelation became clear was enough to force me to reconsider everything I'd ever known. I had no idea how much of my life he had fabricated to make me into what he needed me to be, and I had no idea what kind of additional power he had, since I could only reason that he was the source of all of my misery.

Now, I wish I knew less about him than I do.

Just yesterday, Brian convinced me to go in for an eight week ultrasound, to check on the baby and see it as it was growing. Under his hypnotic pressure, I happily agreed, and we went to the doctor's office at last. It was the first time anything had gone properly for me in months, and I had to be under my roommate's horrific mind control to experience it.

We arrived and eventually were seen in to the room where the procedure was to take place. In addition to the fact that things went the way we intended them to, I encountered no one who was cruel to me while I was with Brian. This small measure of peace would have flooded me with relief, had I been myself at the time. But I was playing the part Brian had forced me to, his loving girlfriend with a baby on the way, and so I was without the sense even to revel in my current circumstances.

The procedure proceeded as normally as any other ultrasound, at first. The doctor was especially gentle with me, as though she sensed that there was some reason I might be grateful for her kindness, and when the images began to appear on screen she did her best to make the moment exciting for the both of us. Although I would not have actually enjoyed the procedure if I had been in my right mind, her sweetness was a blessing for me to remember fondly. It wasn't until the images of Brian's child appeared on the screen that I woke up enough from his trance to be alarmed.

What we saw on the monitor wasn't human. There was no way it could have been. It wasn't a distorted image, either; as clear as though in daylight, a monstrosity was staring out at us from the screen, a monstrosity that I knew was contained within my uterus. The thing had mandibles, it looked like, ones that gnashed and twitched even as we watched. The head was sleek and round, almost human, except for the eyes, which were far too large to be a human babies'. The body appeared to be a mass of writhing limbs, all tangled up together, and twitching in unsettling ways. The horrifying image was enough to shock be out of Brian's hypnosis for a few minutes, and I noticed that I could feel the tiny monster's limbs wriggling within me.

Brian had a pleasant look on his face, like he couldn't have been more proud, but the doctor and I were sharing a moment of deep terror. She stuttered and stared at the image, turning back to my roommate and I.

"I...I have never seen anything like this, this must be...some kind of mistake, like a machine malfunction or--" She would have continued, if not for Brian, who stared at her the same way he'd stared at me every time he needed to convince me of something clearly untrue.

"Nothing is wrong, what are you talking about?" He said. His voice was once again split into two, the horrific, hypnotic one nearly drowning out the one belonging to Brian. "The baby looks wonderful! I can't believe that's our little kid in there, like, wow! Isn't that amazing, Dor?"

He turned to me, then, and it was the same as before. My personality shrank back into oblivion, silenced into agreement with this creature from another world. I nodded, and so did our doctor, the both of us sinking into Brian's words like they were an ocean.

"Of course, babe," I replied, beaming with pride. "That's our little baby. We're gonna have a baby. We're gonna be parents!"

Brian's face grew dark, then. He shook his head, and for one moment I could see an overlapping image; it was the one I had remembered from the night he had raped me, the image of another version of my roommate. It was more clear this time, however. Whatever it was, I can't explain it. It was a fuzzy looking picture over the image of a human man, and the picture looked like some giant insect, like a larger version of the disgusting thing inside of me.

"No," It said. "I am going to be a parent. You are going to be a host."

Then, as quickly as the image had come, it disappeared. Our doctor didn't seem to register that there had been anything there, didn't seem to understand that what Brian had just said was horrifying and made no sense. And neither did I. I accepted, blindly, that what he said was truth. We returned home without another word spoken on the matter, and then he went to his room(which I still haven't seen the inside of since he moved in.)

I haven't heard from him since, and now that he's gone, the hypnosis is wearing off. I know that if he returns, I will be back to being a slave, carrying the spawn of a creature I can't fully explain.

I want to run, but I don't know if I can.

No Peace

My new roommate has made my life into a living hell.

I thought that things couldn't get any worse, but I was proven to be wrong on every level. Somehow, after the night that Brian apparently raped me, every aspect of my life became an invasion of privacy from all sides. Moment after moment of harassment and humiliation followed me wherever I went. At work, almost every single one of my co-workers had made attempts to coerce me into sex, and the incidents had become a daily part of my routine. The constant, demeaning nature of this became a barrage, and made me feel helpless. I couldn't report all of my co-workers to Human Resources: they never would have believed that all of them were treating me so poorly.

In addition, I found my efforts to unwind and enjoy myself elsewhere frustrated by one thing after another. Once, going for a walk, I was stopped by an incredibly long parade that stretched across my regular path and seemed to follow me, whatever direction I took to avoid it. Another time, when I went to get myself a cup of coffee from Starbucks, there was a customer in line ahead of me who became irate with some error on the part of the cashier, and it took the staff nearly half an hour to convince him to leave. During that time, he held up the line, and when he had finally been escorted from the premises someone cut in front of me to get their drink without so much as a passing glance.

These incidents may have been minor inconveniences by themselves, but altogether, and on a daily basis they conspired to turn my life into one frustration after another. It was as though Brian moving into my apartment had set some cosmic wheel in motion, a wheel that placed me beneath it and crushed me.

And then, to my horror, I discovered that the worst thing imaginable had happened.

I arrived home from work late one evening, and was shocked to find that Brian was nowhere to be found. His bedroom door was locked, but the light was off, and he wasn't on the couch or in the shower. Realizing that I had my apartment to myself for the first time in months, I resolved to relax for once, and take the stress off of myself by drinking a few beers. The alcohol did the trick, and I spent the evening watching television and having fun by myself. It was a pleasure I could barely remember having ever been able to have.

It couldn't last. The next morning, despite the fact that I had not had that much to drink, I woke up to a terrible hang over.

The same was true the next morning, although I did not drinking the night before. And again, the morning after that, I found myself nauseous and uncomfortable.

I hadn't been alarmed, at first, when I'd missed my period that month because my birth control occasionally caused me to miss it for months at a time. But now, finding myself sick day in and day out, I began to panic. I rushed from my home one night and bought a pregnancy test, and discovered the twisted truth: I was pregnant with Brian's child.

For a week afterward, I was a nervous wreck. I had no idea what to do. Telling Brian would be telling my own potential rapist that he was the father of a child within my body, one that I was certainly going to abort, but not telling him seemed wrong somehow. Despite all the grief he had put me through, he still had some bizarre power over my thoughts and feelings. I struggled to get through work on Friday, and, finally swallowing the knot that had been in my throat since making the discovery, I decided to inform Brian over the weekend.

When I awoke Saturday morning, I immediately dressed myself and prepared for what I was sure would be the most difficult conversation of my life. I left my room and found Brian, who was sprawled casually on the sofa, looking like he didn't have a care in the world. This man had come to be so associated with suck darkness in my mind that I almost retreated, giving up on my endeavor in favor of quietly aborting the child. But I knew that if I did not persevere now, there might be no hope of my ever regaining control of my life. I approached my roommate carefully, and as I did, he looked up at me with an unusual fondness in his expression

"Oh, hey there, Dor." He said, grinning. He could apparently tell I meant business by the look on my face, and his affectionate grin disappeared instantly. "What's up?"

"Brian, we need to talk." I said, trying hard to keep from collapsing in on myself. The last few months of my life had been such a nightmare that my ability to steel myself in any situation had been devastated.

"I can tell." Brian replied. "So, I ask again: what's up?"

"I..." I started, and I took a deep breath that rattled my lungs, so that I could be sure I would not cave in. "I'm pregnant, Brian. And it has to be your child. I haven't slept with anyone since that incident between you and I last month."

And then a strange and terrifying thing happened. Brian wrinkled his nose, his expression changed into one of confused amusement, and he continued to stare at me with that same look of affection as before.

"Incident? That's a funny way of putting it, babe," He said. "Anyway, that's...wow. You're pregnant. Holy shit."

He was treating it like it was casual news. Yet again, it was like stepping into an alternate world, one where Brian had complete control over the thrust of every conversation despite my protestations. A world, that I was about to learn, was more horrifying than I could ever imagine.

"Yeah, I don't know how it happened," I heard myself reply, just as casually. I had lost my focus, somehow. Although a part of my head was screaming at me to remember how terrible this news was, that part was buried deeper now, beneath some foreign object in my mind that made me feel numb and unconcerned.

"My birth control must have failed." I said.

"That makes sense. So..." Brian said, and he was hesitant. There was something curious and strange in his eyes, as though he were internally debating something in earnest.

"Do we want to keep it?" He finally asked.

The rational part of my brain that knew this question made no sense threw fits, trying to unlock itself from whatever cage it had been put into within my brain. But the overwhelming force that had consumed my every thought turned me away from such thoughts, and made me respond to my roommate in kind.

"I don't know. We have been together a long time..." I said, even though this was utter nonsense. "I know we're not married, but it would feel wrong, somehow, to just get rid of it..."

This was the only thing I said that made even a grain of sand's worth of sense; something about the idea of aborting the child, from the moment I had discovered my own pregnancy, struck me as wrong despite my having every reason to dislike the idea. Brian nodded along in silent agreement with me until I was done speaking words that were not my own, and then he spoke up again. When he did, it was with a voice I simultaneously did and did not recognize. There was his own voice, the one I knew, and there was something else over the top of it. It was as though two people were speaking at once, and it quieted my resistance even further, pushing any dissenting thoughts I had to the very back of my mind.

"Well," He said. "I've always known I wanted kids. And you're right about us, we have been together for a long time. I love you. If you're comfortable raising my child..."

He paused. I wondered why he had referred to it specifically as his child instead of as simply a child.

"Then I'd really like to have this kid with you." He finished.

I found myself smiling, although I can no longer explain why I did so. Any semblance of my true self was washed out in that moment, replaced with a cruel, twisted mockery that agreed to things I would never have.

"I agree." I said. "I love you, too. I'd like to keep it."

There was more, but it was of hardly any consequence, and I remember very little after the point at which I told my rapist(and I know for certain that he must have raped me, now, because nothing else makes sense in conjunction with everything else that has happened since) that I love him.

I have made several attempts to schedule an abortion since, because whatever hypnosis Brian has me under seems to only work when I am around, now. But each time I've tried calling or showing up, something has stopped me. First, the phone lines at the abortion clinic were down and no one was able to respond. Then, when I arrived in person, for a walk-in appointment, they were closed down and I could find no way of contacting anyone who worked inside. At this rate, I will pass the point where an abortion is even possible, and that thought terrifies me. I can't bare the thought of having Brian's child, knowing that he has some sort of mind controlling power over me, a power he has used at every turn since moving in to make my life worse.

But what else can I do? My life is in shambles, and every attempt I make to make it better is thwarted, if not by Brian than by some external force hellbent on making me miserable.

I am surrounded on all sides by horror.

Terrifying Developments

Things could not get any worse with my new roommate.

Brian and I were finally on good terms a few weeks after our discussion. We cleaned up each other's messes, spent time watching movies together, and generally developed a bond that I had feared would never happen after the rough three week start we got off on. We became fast friends, and I thought things would continue to go well. In fact, life was improving for me in a number of ways, in a number of places.

Unfortunately, however, my work with Spyrian Mobile brought me more displeasure the longer I remained. I enjoyed the work, but around the same time that Brian was moving in, my co-workers began to act hostile towards me more often. Women have to tolerate a lot in the work place, especially in positions that are seen as traditionally male such as mine, but the things I was dealing with on a weekly basis were quickly becoming unbearable.

One particularly nasty incident occurred while I was outside taking a smoke break. A co-worker of mine approached, and he smiled. I had seen him around, and the two of us had spoken maybe once or twice, but I could not recall his name and did not think of him as anything other than business acquaintance.

"Hey there," He said. "How are ya?"

"I'm good." I said, and I tried to make it clear that I just wasn't interested in conversation. It had been a long day, and I wanted to unwind by myself for just a few minutes before re-entering the fray yet again. He didn't take the hint.

"Good, good," He said. Then he paused, like he was trying to convince himself to continue. "You, uh...do you have a boyfriend? Because I think you and I...we'd really make a good couple. I mean I don't know you all that well, I just...um..."

He was stammering. It seemed like the query was in good conscience, so I couldn't bring myself to be bothered, even if I was going to have to turn him down.

"Oh, no, I'm not really interested in dating anyone right now," I said, and I smiled to try and reassure him, although I didn't owe him the gesture. Considering his response, I wish I hadn't been as gentle or kind as I was. It may have made me look weak and easy. One way or another, his response shocked and appalled me.

"Oh, seriously, come on," He started in, glaring at me like I had shot a puppy in front of him. "I've caught you looking at me more than once. You know you want me, so you oughta at least let me get on that."

My response might as well have been daggers, shot straight from my eyes into his brain stem. If that were something I could actually do, I would have definitely done it.

"Excuse me?" I began. I'd have continued, too, but a feeling overcame me. It was feeling of dread, of sudden, indescribable fear that retaliation would bring me pain. My co-worker was staring at me, and in his eyes, I saw the end of any defense I could muster. He had shot me down without saying anything more. His eyes spoke volumes about what he wanted from me, how little he cared for my thoughts or my feelings. And somehow this feeling, wherever it had come from, convinced me that anyone would take his side in the matter over mine. I backed up, actually fearful, but by then he was already walking away with a look of disgust on his face.

"Whatever," He spat. "Just forget it."

And then he was gone, leaving me shaking like a leaf. The rest of the day at work was a blur. Ordinarily, I'd have taken my complaint straight to Human Resources without so much as a second thought, and would have thought as much about the incident as someone does the shape of their cereal in the mornings. But his awful, piercing stare had seeped into me, and it wouldn't leave me be. I had seen it before, somewhere, but I could not remember where. I didn't say a word about the incident to anyone, and hurried home as fast as I could, trying hard not to think about

When I got home that evening, Brian was there on the couch, drinking beer and playing video games. He waved. He was friendly. We got to talking, and played multiplayer video games for the rest of the night. I told him about my day, and he expressed sympathy. After that, though, my memory of the night became a blur. The only thing I could remember the next morning were unclear visions of Brian, and seeing that there was more than one of him, in a way. There was one of him that appeared to be my roommate, the man I'd met and become friends with, and there was another that was something else altogether. Something unexplainable, indescribable, like an image interrupting the one that I knew.

When I awoke the next morning, I noticed first that I was cold, and second that there was a dull ache between my legs. I sat up from my place on the couch, and looked down. I was completely naked, except for my bra, which remained loosely affixed to my chest. I couldn't make sense of what was going on; there was no reason I should have been nude, nor that I should have fallen asleep on the couch. I tried to recall the previous night, but couldn't, and it was then that the terrifying thought crossed my mind that I might have been drugged.

The only logical conclusion I could come to was that I had been raped

It took me some time to register that I was still in my own apartment, and that there was no one who could have raped me the night before but Brian. I found my clothes scattered all over the floor, put them back on, and sat on the couch in terror. How could I confront him? If he had raped me, he would either be long gone by now or he might try to threaten me into silence. If he hadn't done so, then I would have an even harder time figuring out just what had happened to me.

On top of all of this horrible confusion, I had no idea why I could not remember anything about the night before. There was no way that Brian could have possibly drugged me, because we had been sitting on opposite ends of a long couch, and he hadn't come close to any of the soda I had drank that night. So what, then, had caused my memory of the night to leave me completely?

I got my answer later, from Brian, when he finally made his way out of his bedroom and into the living room. He was grinning when he entered the room, but that quickly faded, as he noticed my visible distress.

"What is it, Dorothy? Are you okay?" He asked, and the question seemed in earnest.

"No, I'm not..." I answered. I had no idea how to approach the subject, and I was scared out of my wits.

"What's wrong?" He asked, his voice soft, and then his face went pale. Just as quickly as his smile had run away, worry lines appeared on his forehead, and he looked guilty. "You...do you regret last night?"

"Last night?" I asked in a blind panic. Brian was giving me the answers I desired without provocation. "I don't remember last night! What hap--"

He didn't allow me the chance to finish my sentence.

"Well, of course you don't remember last night," He began. His face had turned dark, and he recoiled some. Clearly, this was not the response he was looking for. "We both got pretty drunk. I'm surprised I remember half as much as I do."

That wasn't the response I had been looking for, either. This was absolutely, without a doubt, the most absurd thing I had ever heard in my life.

"Brian, I don't drink! What the hell is going on?!"

"You drank last night," He said, and I was overcome with feelings of guilt. I remembered Brian offering me a beer, but I also remembered turning it down. Yet, just like when I had confronted him about his cigarette butts, I felt compelled to agree with his arguments. He was right, it was silly of me to deny it in the first place. We had had a few beers, and there wasn't any shame in admitting to that. So why was I so adamant that I hadn't?

The sudden recollection that something had happened between us brought me back to the truth; I had never touched a drop of alcohol in my life, and to suggest or think otherwise was ridiculous. There was simply no way that I had gotten drunk with Brian, and no way that what he was implying by telling me so was true, either.

None of it made any sense. I knew I had turned down the alcohol and the contradiction forced my brain to shut down. I stared at Brian, dumbfounded, waiting for further explanation. As if any answer he gave could be trusted.

"You and I drank a lot, and we started talking about that guy who was a dick to you at work yesterday..." He said. "I'm not sure why, but we started making out, and then after a while you said you wanted to...y'know...and so we did."

He didn't seem to feel very embarrassed, nor sympathetic to the fact that I was scared, confused, and certain that things had not occurred the way he was telling me they had.

"I...no...that can't...I would never have done that, it does--" I replied, my voice quavering.

He cut me off again, then, and any bond between the two of us snapped like a twig. I knew, I knew, that I had done no drinking the night before. Despite all evidence to the contrary, despite my roommates strange power over my memories, there was no way I had gotten drunk and had sex with Brian. He had to be wrong.

"Well, you did. We did." He replied. He shook his head and shrugged. The tone of voice he took was tense, like a parent scolding a child for something petty. "I guess if you don't want to do that again, we won't. Okay?"

I couldn't believe my ears. There was something in the way he spoke that made it impossible to defend myself from his brutal words. It was the same sort of indignant, almost hypnotic tone that he'd used with me when I confronted him about the stray cigarette butts. He made me feel small and weak, and I did nothing as he turned and left the room.

The weeks since have been strained and uncomfortable. I can't bring myself to spend time with Brian any longer, which means that I have been effectively pushed out of my own living room; when he's not spending hours in his room being silent, he's on the couch playing video games or watching Netflix. Not only that, but if I leave my room and happen to pass him by, he'll glare at me like I'm an enemy from a foreign country.

I feel like my apartment has become a minefield. Whatever way I turn, traces of Brian are there. The place is a wreck once again, and I don't have the energy or the courage most days to clean it up.

There has to be some way to make things right, to make myself feel comfortable again. But short of kicking Brian out, I'm not sure what to do.

My New Roommate

I have a new roommate.

I wasn't really sure, to begin with, that I wanted one. Money was tight, sure, but not so tight that I couldn't have continued paying for this place on my own. My internship with Spyrian Mobile was going well, so well in fact that if I played my cards right, I'd certainly have wound up with a job right out of the gate. An IT professional makes a whole lot more than a lowly intern, and interns don't make chump change.

But the apartment had begun to feel lonely a lot of the time, like it had been emptied of all personality, all life. And besides, I had so much extra space I wasn't doing anything with, why not rent the spare bedroom out to someone for a little while? It was a surefire way to boost the amount I could save each month, and give me a little extra spending money here and there for fun things.

It was good idea, even if I wasn't completely sure I wanted to have to share my space with another person.

The first promising person who answered my ads(one on Craigslist, which drew responses from several dirty old men and one young girl who I'm pretty sure was a dirty old man pretending to be eighteen years old, and one ad posted on the library notice board a few blocks from where I live) was named Brian, and we instantly hit it off. He was kind-hearted, passionate about zoology, which he was going to school for, and seemed like the easy-going sort. Perfect roommate material, because it was clear from the get-go that all he needed was a place to sleep and prepare food. He definitely wouldn't be invading my space at all.

Or so I thought.

Unfortunately, after only two weeks with Brian as a roommate, something else became clear to me: he had no idea how to clean up after himself, and no concept of how to share property with another person. Distressing little warning signs began to pop up almost immediately after he moved in, and they were everywhere; he left his bottle of toothpaste, opened, on the side of the sink so that globs of gooey blue mess oozed out all over; the kitchen would be destroyed when he was finished with it, a sea of filthy dishes and crumbs and food product left behind in his wake; whenever he got mail, he would toss the empty envelopes, and sometimes even the mail itself, onto whatever flat surface was nearest, even if that surface happened to be the floor; and, it seemed that whenever I needed it most, Brian was already ahead of me in the shower, and he took a long, long time to shower.

The experience was so frustrating that, after three weeks, I chose to confront him about it. This was the first time we'd had a real conversation since he moved in, too, because Brian quickly stopped communicating with me in anything more than one-word answers soon after he had his things in the spare bedroom. His bedroom, now.

"Brian...are you in there?" I called, knocking on his door as politely as I possibly could, given my irritation. I'd just found yet another symptom of his terrible habits on my living room floor: cigarette butts, casually discarded as if the phrase "trash can" had never once been spoken in my increasingly annoying roommates presence. I persevered through the initial silence, because I was sure he was home, "We need to talk about some stuff."

"What is it?" He answered, finally, through the door. He had an awful tendency to retreat into his room for hours at a time and only come out to inconvenience me somehow. God knows what he was doing in there.

"I just found...look, can you come out? I'd rather we discuss it...y'know...not shout through the door."

I heard grumbling, and then the sound of someone shuffling through what sounded like mounds of trash, and then Brian opened the door and peeked out at me. He seemed to not want to let me look inside, which wasn't too much of a bother, since I had no intention of looking into a room that smelled as badly as his did. Briefly, I was terrified that if it came down to it, kicking him out would mean cleaning up whatever unholy mess he had left behind in the spare bedroom.

"What is it?" He repeated, like I was the one ruining his day, and not the other way around.

"I just got done sweeping the whole living room, Brian, because..." I sighed. "If you want to live here, you can't leave cigarette butts on the floor, and you can't leave gigantic messes everywhere that you don't ever clean up."

"I don't do that." He responded bluntly. I could see, then, that this wasn't going to be easy.

"Yeah, Brian...you do." I said, and I continued, "I just swept a bunch of cigarette butts up off the floor, and I did a load of dishes that were really grimy, and I'd appreciate it if you could finish cleaning the kitchen up the rest of the way. We're roommates, we've both got to work together, okay?"

He grunted. I could see dark, blotchy circles beneath his eyes that weren't there when he moved in to the apartment. In fact, I couldn't remember if the circles were there when he first opened the door, they seemed so fresh an observation. It was like the mere act of defending himself from me was tiring him out, causing him to be exhausted.

"I didn't leave all of those cigarette butts," He said at last. "You must have left at least one or two of them there by accident."

I gawked. This was the most blatantly stupid thing I'd heard anyone say in a while, and I had heard some real winners just in the past week, dealing with people at work.

"I don't smoke." I said.

"Yes you do, I've seen you smoking before!" He replied indignantly.

A strange feeling came over me, then, as though Brian and I were living in two completely different worlds. He really, honestly thought that I smoked cigarettes. Despite the fact that I had told him, outright, when he moved in, that I didn't...he now thought I did. And the weirdest part of this feeling was that, just for a second, I believed him. I wanted to cave and admit that I did smoke cigarettes, that maybe I had left one or two of those butts on the floor by mistake when I missed the ashtray, of course it was silly of me to accuse him of having been the only one at fault...

I managed to snap back to reality, but it was too late; my resolve had been weakened and Brian was pushing his way out into the kitchen to start cleaning. I stared after him, and tried to think of something to say, but I couldn't. I felt as deflated as a balloon that's been leaking helium for several days. Whatever strange feeling had come over me before was gone now, but I still couldn't shake my discomfort. Trying to shrug it off, I left the house, and went out to get myself something to eat.

My time out was nice, since the air this time of year is clear and breezy. It was just what I needed to clear my head. I would have been in a fantastic mood by the time I got home, had it not been for my waiter. He was obviously new, because I've eaten at this same Italian restaurant many times before and never seen him. All night, every time he thought his manager wasn't looking, he flirted and attempted to make awkward conversation with me. It was incredibly uncomfortable and I left as quickly as possible. Needless to say, I didn't tip my waiter.

When I returned home, the apartment was immaculate. Brian had cleaned everything from top to bottom, and the place looked fantastic. I don't think even I had ever made it look so nice, not since moving in, at least.

Moreover, when I got home, Brian was sitting on the couch in the living room playing video games. He smiled at me as I entered, the familiar smile that had convinced me to trust him in my apartment to begin with.

"Wanna watch a movie?" He asked, pausing his game just to extend the offer, looking at me like I was his best friend in the world.

I agreed, and felt better than I had about my roommate situation in weeks. We spent the rest of the night chatting and making fun of a couple of movies, and by the end of the night when I laid down for bed I was convinced that we would be good friends after all. The nonsense of the past behind us, now we could forge a new path and really benefit from each other's presence in the apartment.

I'm not sure how long this will last, though. Just today I came home from work to find that the bathroom was, yet again, a mess. I don't know if this was purposeful or not, but it's concerning to say the least.

"intrude" [in-trood]
 
Part of Speech: verb

Definition: to trespass; interrupt

Synonyms: barge in, bother, butt in, chisel in, cut in, disturb, encroach, entrench, go beyond, hold up, horn in, infringe, insinuate, intercalate, interfere, interject, interlope, intermeddle, interpolate, interpose, introduce, invade, meddle, obtrude, overstep, pester, push in, thrust, violate