Married to my roommate

Well, not literally. Cause that would be plain weird. You see, my roomie is my cousin. We have been room mates for over a year now. I have been away from home since high school and have had many room mates for brief periods of time. In many ways I feel I was married to each one of them. Sans the whole physical aspect of the relationship, but. Seriously, living with a roomie and making sure you don’t bite each other’s head off does take a little bit of work. But living with my cousin does have its plus points, I guess. For one, I have known her practically my whole life so there is no awkward ‘getting to know each other’ phase. And we also go to the same college so we can share a ride and save money. AND we also are almost the same size so we can swap clothes. Yeah. But then there is also a downside. The disagreements are extra ugly. But then again, fights with all roomies are ugly because after you are done storming off, bitching and venting out, you’ll have to return to the same place and to the same roomie.

Roomies do play a huge role in our personality development, believe it or not. College life is a formative period and our friends and peers do play some role in molding our outlook. Why else do you think so many people get hooked to drugs in their college life, or ditch the encyclopedia for Cosmo? In my first year, I had this room mate who could easily put the bats to shame. She had this herculean power of staying up the whole freaking night and sleeping throughout the classes. Unnoticed, that too. And then I had this wall mate who would come knocking at my door at the most random hours for the most random things. I remember she once woke me up at around 4 a.m. for contraceptive pills. Yeah, right. I carry them around in my purse!

What’s weird is that most of them have left some sort of souvenir in me. Its like they have lent me a tiny part of themselves without me ever asking. I cannot imagine sleeping before 1 a.m. now. Another former roommate of mine got me into science fiction. I hated, HATED whiskey. But now I can reasonably tolerate it. See what I mean by personality development?