October 17, 2024

This feels like such loser behavior, but I direly need to vent -- both for my own wellbeing, but also because I think it'll be valuable to have these thoughts, my story, somewhere established and publicly available, should I need that kind of thing. This is a LONG STORY, but I always think context is important.

I need to scream about my roommate.

I'm always skeptical to air out roommate drama because beef in the domestic sphere is so easy to misinterpret. Also, I'm not going to lie, I feel that people with ? Is it really?

But this case is so long and nuanced of a story that I feel like I need to put it in a written record so I can stop telling people about it. So here we go.

I moved in with my current roommate in January 2023, into a two-bedroom apartment. Just the two of us and my cat. They had always been interested in getting a cat of their own, and I was receptive to the possibility, since my cat was young (~2) and really playful.

Flash forward to August 2023. I'm at home, eating dinner with a guest awkwardly staying in my apartment for 2 weeks (long story) when a neighbor knocks on my door. She's from two buildings over and stopped by just to tell me that there was a stray cat loose in her building's laundry room, and she wanted to know if it was my cat (since she'd seen my cat in our window) or if I knew whose it was. I told her that it wasn't mine, but I'd see if my roommate was interested in looking after it and seeing if we could either find his owner or, well, my roommate did want to pick up another cat, so... we'd see what happened.

My roommate returned around 11:00 that night, after volunteering at a local theatre. They were interested in checking out the cat, so we went right away. Sure enough, as soon as we entered the other apartment building, this tiny orange thing launches himself at us, volleying around the laundry room, rubbing against our legs, meowing ferverously the whole time. He had a blue collar around his neck, but no tag. We took him in my carrier to the nearest 24 hour vet, where they determined he wasn't chipped. He wasn't neutered, either.

My roommate fell in love with him immediately. It was beyond evident. They allegedly made a NextDoor post and contacted our leasing office to see about finding his owner; these were the only steps they took. So they assumed the cat. The Barbie movie had just come out; they named him Ken.

I refused to let him interact with my cat until Ken had been seen by a vet and had been vaccinated. After all, this was a cat from off the streets! During this time, Ken was confined to my roommate's bedroom, where he was so active and vocal that my roommate was unable to sleep in their own room. For more than a week, my roommate slept in the couch of our living room. When their boyfriend spent the night, they blew up an air mattress.

Then, because my roommate wanted to sleep in their bed again, we alternated which cat received full roam of the apartment overnight. Ken would remain holed up in my roommate's bedroom during the day, but would be shut out of their bedroom overnight. Overnight, my cat would be shut into my bedroom. Sometimes Ken would slip away when my roommate's door was opened, because he really did yearn for freedom. Even early on, he'd spend most of his days throwing himself against the walls and door. Ken spent his nights tearing up our carpets to try to reach my cat. To this day, he spends a surplus of his time with a paw stuck underneath the door, batting at anything that walks past. When he'd slip free, he and my cat would immediately begin chasing each other. Let me make it clear that this was not in play.

Early on, my roommate asked if I could take Ken to the vet. This was at a time where I was already responsible for my own cat and the cleaning and maintenance of the entire apartment. This isn't an exaggeration. Admittedly, I snapped at them. I had already provided all of the supplies they had thus far, and I wasn't inclined to give up my most fraught resource -- my time -- for a cat that was already driving me up the wall. With this boundary set, my roommate responded by not speaking to me for a week. When we finally spoke again, they expressed that they were frustrated because they believed they'd be getting more support from me in this. I made it clear that Ken was their cat, I have plenty of my own responsibilities, and we would see if he integrated into our household.

So things kept on like that for a few months. Ken was still wildly and disruptively energetic, knocking things off of the top of the fridge and eating food from the pantry. Eventually, my roommate got him neutered, suspending Ken's nightly assumptions of the living room. His energy took a long time to wear off after that point.

The vet had also said that Ken was fully grown by the time we'd found him, but I sincerely doubt that.

Move into January. While my roommate is helping me re-dye my hair, they're telling me about their New Year's resolutions. For one, they wanted to work to prevent themselves from stewing on things that made them upset and instead talking about them openly, since they knew that had a propensity for envisioning what someone else was thinking and getting upset by it. I'm paraphrasing. In this time, I've already felt that my roommate and I had been drifting apart; despite living and working together, I hardly saw them, and I couldn't tell if they were making efforts to avoid seeing me, so I told them that I was sure they sometimes felt like this towards me and that I was open to talking things out at any time. They didn't respond to this. Their other resolution was to integrate our cats.

Their integration method consisted of waiting until I wasn't home and letting our cats run wild and free. They refused to try any other gradual method, since they presumed it wouldn't work with their cat. Ken was too energetic.

At the end of January, my cat began developing UTI symptoms. I took him to the vet. He didn't have a UTI; he had developed a stress ulcer on his urethra. I told my roommate that they would not be attempting to integrate our cats unless I was present. What do you know, all attempts to integrate our cats stopped entirely.

So things were in a sort of tense limbo for the next five months. In that time, I continued to feel like my friend of several years was gradually cutting me from their life. Again, we lived and worked together. We serve on the Executive Board of our Union together. The only times I would see them would be when I drove them to Union meetings, where they'd give me one-word responses to questions. At the end of May, I brought up head-on that I'd been feeling hurt, left out, and like I'd done something wrong or upset them in some way. They feigned surprise and said they'd had no idea I felt this way. I'll also admit that this conversation happened after I'd had an angry outburst at my roommate obfuscating information about hanging out with some of our mutual friends, seemingly indending to leave me out. They told me that this wasn't their intention, but I still don't believe that.

So now, June 2024. I leave town for a week to attend a training. On the Wednesday of that week, my roommate texts me that my cat has been urinating on the couch repeatedly. I am immediately perturbed, calling the vet he had seen in January to see about refilling prescriptions, calling my partner to see if he can go check on my cat, frantically researching what to do. Given that it was stress-based in January, I reckon it's stress-based here, too; I tell my roommate that when I return we're discussing rehoming their cat.

This is something we should have talked about long before it ever got to this point. Our household was never set up for a second cat, and a failure to integrate the cats meant Ken should have gone right then and there. Not only is this undue stress on my cat, keeping an energetic cat holed up in one room isn't a humane option for him, either.

I left my training early to come back to my cat, arriving on Thursday night. My roommate continued to avoid me until Monday evening, where I had to purposefully camp out to catch them when they got home. We had the conversation right then and there; I told them that I wasn't angry, just frustrated. They responded that they were angry. So I told them that, okay, I'm angry too.

Their main qualms were that I didn't "give them enough grace" in the immediate moment, and that suggesting Ken be rehomed -- something traumatic -- wasn't a viable option. During the conversation, they accused me of "talking down to them like they were nine years old" -- to which I'd like to refer them back to a therapist that can help them address their childhood traumas, because feeling like a nine-year-old while navigating a domestic conflict has little to do with me. Yes, I am angry while writing this.

My roommate also denied that my cat's stress-based health concern had anything to do with Ken, rerouting it to my being gone for a few days. I want to stress that this was not the first time I'd been away from my cat for several days. It was, however, the first time I'd been away from my cat for several days while Ken was in the apartment.

My cat continued to urinate on the couch, regardless of whether I was home or not. In taking him to two more vets, he was diagnosed with feline idiopathic cystitis -- though there isn't a proper medical understanding of why this happens, when my cat gets stressed, the cells in the lining of his bladder become inflamed. My cat is stressed the fuck out. I wonder how that's happened?

In the wake of this conversation, my roommate responded by not speaking to me for a month. They came home from work one day in July and began speaking to me as if nothing had happened, with the weakest acknowledgement of "it's been a while since we've caught up!" As of this writing, they have not spoken to me for the last two and a half months, if not more. I have no fucking clue why, other than that they refuse to acknowledge that they are directly responsible for a problem within our apartment and would rather ignore it, and me, than fix it -- something that would require them to reconcile their reality with whatever fantasy they have playing in their head. I am still so sure that they live in a deep well of shame that they've plastered together with a thick-skulled pride that makes it easier to shut someone out than become vulnerable with themselves and the realization that their actions are problematic.

I'm fucking livid. I'm livid for a lot of reasons -- the denial of their own responsibility, their refusal to communicate in the slightest, their delusion that their cat is perfectly happy throwing himself at the walls and yowling all day, that they chose a cat over the friendship we used to have. We used to be great friends, and now I'm counting down the days until my lease ends and I have to quadruple-text them to get even a response. I'm angry that I have to live with someone who takes such lengths to avoid me that they let dishes mold in their bedroom and wait until I leave town again to run mugs full of maggots through the dishwasher. I'm angry that their cat has cost us our security deposit. I'm angry that I've spent over a thousand dollars in vet bills this year to fix problems they've caused. I'm angry that I have to syringe painkiller into my cat's mouth -- a painkiller that he fucking hates -- while they sit in their room and deny that there's even a problem. PS, the dishwasher doesn't clean out maggots.

I'm sure my roommate has been speaking ill about me to their friends. I'm sure of it. Maybe they're afraid of me, I don't know. If there's one thing I noticed of my former friend after living with them, in every story they tell, nothing is ever their fault. Everything always happens to them. It's always that their ex was transphobic, never that their relationship was shitty and then they totaled his car and he had to take them to court to work out a legally-binding repayment plan for the damages. It's always that a coworker is mean to them. It's always that their boyfriend did something wrong again, or didn't do something, or did do something. It's always that the guy they asked out wasn't interested, not that he saw how they treated their last partner and wanted nothing to do with that. Nothing is ever their fault. So I'm sure, in their retelling, this isn't their fault, either, even though it very pointedly is. If I could fix my cat's health without them, I would.

I can't be friends with someone who refuses to communicate, or refuses to work through problems. I can't be friends with someone who thinks ignoring and avoiding is conflict resolution. Good fucking luck to whoever lives with them next.

Man. All of this and I still don't feel like I'm done. Ugh. There are so many other details that speak even further to how misaligned with reality my roommate is that I didn't even get to.

Lease ends in December. Lease ends in December. Lease ends in December.