Defeat is mine

She won.

I broke the silence.

I returned from an afternoon at the beach and the grocery store yesterday and headed to the kitchen to unload my booty (get it? Because I’m a Truth Pirate?) even though rustling and clanging announced her presence in the very room. Bolstered by a conversation I had just had with my chauffer to these locales, I went into the fiery gates of the kitchen thinking, “This is getting a wee bit ridiculous. I think about this all the time. Why don’t I just ask her the reason for all this beeyotchery?”

I had to walk past her to get into the narrow corridor that is home to my sole cupboard. With a friendly smile plastered to my face I shyly said, “excuse me,” expecting at least a little bit of eye contact. Instead she flattened her girth against the wall and looked determinedly to the ground, violently returning to whatever organizational task she had commenced before I had upset the chi of the house by entering.

I started unloading my plastic bags (themselves an egregious offense—my roommates had told me emphatically at the beginning of my stay that they only used cloth grocery bags so as to do their part for the environment), steeling myself for a confrontation. Then a note tacked to the wall above the sink caught my eye. I read it with the uncomfortable knowledge of her knowledge that I was reading it.

“Please squeeze out the sponge when you are done using it,” it read. “Leaving it wet will result in mold. Also return it to the cup, as leaving it in the sink results in the same problem.”

The note defeated any courage I had had in commencing my verbal affront. I retreated to my room and began chatting with my co-Truth Pirate, Wink, about the latest battle in Roommate Wars 2007. She convinced me that it was not too late; the time was now. She also offered the brilliant suggestion that I record the conversation.

My mp3 player tucked surreptitiously into the right pocket of my hooded sweatshirt, I gathered my courage and knocked on the door.

Apparently the reason she has not spoken to me for the past 41 days is because I didn’t clean the bathroom. Apparently I was supposed to guess that this was what she wanted. Apparently when she told me in mid-June that she was starting a new job and wouldn’t be able to “clean up after me” anymore when I left one bowl in the sink while the dishwasher ran was the extent of her maturity when it came to household manners. Henceforth I was supposed to have relied on clairvoyance.

After she told me about how hurt she was I never inquired about her new job (with which I countered her silence on such subjects as my birthday, an illness in my family, um… a gigantic BRIDGE collapsing two blocks away from my old apartment), she turned to friendly banter, quizzing me with a quickfire obnoxiousness about my next job I had forgotten she possessed in this month and a half of silence. I backed slowly out of her room before escaping back into my cave.

I have a feeling I’m going to look back on my quiet time with fondness.