The world is a wretched and godforsaken place that will take away anything you hold near and dear to your heart in an instant. An orange slip of paper taped onto my dorm room door was the only warning I was granted. And the moment my eyes laid upon it, everything would change.
I swallowed and stared at it. Something appeared to be wrong. Something was wrong. My shaky hand drifted towards the tangerine harbinger of death and gingerly peeled it off.
“Work Order—Pest control,” it read.
I was thoroughly confused—my roommate and I never dealt with vermin. And so, I opened the door, only to find our room untouched. Was it all a mistake? A work order notice haphazardly placed on the wrong door? And then it all clicked together in a fantastical, mind-boggling epiphany.
It was the way she would scurry around the floor. How she was particularly attracted to the trash I hadn’t taken out yet. “Just one more day,” she would insist. Her fondness of the day-old bowls of spicy Buldak ramen littering the room. How she insisted we never buy a mini fridge. How I could never seem to find the occasional source of buzzing in our room. How she would never sleep in her bed, but instead under it, behind her clothes cabinets.
I pulled out my phone and checked Find my iPhone for my roommate’s location. It had mysteriously disappeared. My worst fears were confirmed. There was no vermin— it was her all along. Now, faced with the grave and deafening silence of a world without her, it finally hit me. She was really, truly gone.
Ever since her disappearance, I’ve missed my roommate and her odd habits. Maybe it was for the better that it all happened so suddenly, more painlessly. For now, each whiff of the lingering smell of Raid in the dorm will only serve to remind me of the now-lost sweet moments we once spent together.
