Ghosts

I'm taking refuge in a local Starbucks as I type. As I suspected, things are getting a little too close for comfort. And, she has driven me to lying. I despise lying and I rarely ever even tell the whitest of lies, but she has been dominating my PC non-stop since she arrived, obsessively checking email and Facebook for signs of Raj 2, who frankly seems to be a replica of Raj 1. Both are imaginary boyfriends as far as I can tell.

So, back to the lying. I told her my PC crashed (knock on wood) and that I had to put it in the shop. That means it's living in my Vespa and I have to go to a coffee shop to use it. It's a nice break for me. Only 5 more days to go now. I feel a little bad about it, but my laptop is very personal to me. I didn't mind her checking her email, but when she's on it for hours without my supervision, it puts me a little uptight. What if she went into my internet history and found this blog??

It hasn't been all bad, of course. In fact, we've had quite a lot of fun. The evening after our shopping day we ended up drinking the night away. Well, actually, I drank the night away. Tyler had a couple of glasses of wine, and Rubi got a contact high.

The three of us were sitting on Rubi's mattress on my bedroom floor having a heated debate about, what else, why Rubi has been unable to lasso a man, when we heard what sounded like a herd of chatty elephants coming up the stairs. We all stopped talking and raised our eyebrows in WTF? There was a knock on my door.

I opened the door to see Tamiko, a past roommate, and her boyfriend standing there. I was drunk and shocked, feeling as if I had crossed into some strange altered reality, so I grabbed her and hugged her.

"Oh my God! What are you doing here?"

"It's a surprise!" she said with a big smile and Japanese accent.

Tamiko had moved back to Japan about a year ago. We've maintained contact via email since she left her cat, Ode, with me to babysit until her boyfriend makes an honest woman of her so she can move back to the States.

"I didn't know you were coming!" I screeched, my head still swimming in too much wine and confusion.

"Nobody knew," she said. "It's a surprise!"

Obviously.

She and her boyfriend visited with her cat for a while, and then they split as quickly as they'd arrived. Perhaps the three ring circus they'd stumbled into scared them away.

What are the chances of two past roommates, both living in faraway lands, to descend on the doorstep of the old house at the same time, without ever talking to each other? I was having a twilight moment for sure, with or without copious amounts of wine. It was as if the house was calling the ghosts of roommates past home. If Mariana had shown up at door I would have truly lost my mind.

More to come... Stay tuned.