Surviving the College Renter’s Experience

Sara Quenzer

You have had it with your douchecanoe of a landlord.  

You call your renter’s emergency maintenance number, which you saved to your contacts after the last three times your ceiling leaked, and you don’t bother with pleasantries. 

The person on the phone is new, apologetic. They sympathize with you about how much it sucks to come home from a long day to a bed soaked with dirty rain water, and to spend the rest of your night doing the sheets and trying to lysol the stain out of your mattress.  

You don’t know why you didn’t rearrange your room after the last time. They told you the problem was fixed—it was just a plugged-up gutter—but gutters don’t stay clear of debris. 

Not through winter. Why didn’t you move your bed? Did you want it to happen again?  

Fuck no, of course you didn’t, nobody wants to spend $15 using the shitty communal washers and dryers in their apartment building’s basement until 1 a.m.: the washers eat your socks; the dryers don’t dry, they just turn clothes from wet to damp; and there’s suspicious stray pubes creeping around.  

You should have moved your bed, you had this coming.  

After hanging up with the emergency maintenance helper, who said no one can come until tomorrow, you yell FUCK knowing that your neighbors can hear you through the walls. You hear one of them laugh and the other bangs their fist against the wall twice, angry about existing around people whose lives don’t revolve around their own schedule, which consists of snoozing their alarm a minimum of eight times every morning, listening to modern country, and playing Dungeons and Dragons.

Laundry you’ve neglected to fold for three days is gathering wrinkles on your homework chair, and you start piling other things on top of it so that you can move your bed. When you throw off the sheets that were supposed to keep you warm that night and heave the mattress onto its side so you can rest it against the wall, you find that your bed frame has rusted. You recognize a part of you which is glad—the frame was annoying and it never worked right anyway—but the annoyed part of you, the part that wanted to lie down and eat stoner nachos in bed, wins out. This is no night for optimism.  

The box spring support has started to get moldy, also from previous water damage, so you pull your snow boots back on and drag your ruined furniture to the dumpster. You worry the dirty water will stain your bedding if you don’t wash it tonight, and after you grab your weathered Ziploc of quarters you stare at your tub of Tide Pods and briefly consider eating one.  

Once the laundry is started, you lysol your mattress. The stain is ugly and misleading. You hate the idea that someone might guess you once had diarrhea so explosive that you couldn’t even get out of bed before bursting—like an antagonist from a C- slapstick who’d had laxatives slipped into their coffee.   

You wish you could set the mattress on fire, but you settle for dropping it back down on the ground, throwing a bowl under the leak, and laying down, finally laying down after you haven’t been home for ten hours, and you close your eyes and take a deep breath, and when you open them again and see the ceiling from a new, far distance, something stirs in your gut. 

You try to ignore it, telling yourself you’re too tired for trauma, and you grab the pack of cigarettes and the matches you keep stashed inside your grey stuffed animal elephant. Really, it was more of an elephant skin. It had once been filled with flax seed (so you could nuke him in the microwave and then have a warm stuffed animal to snuggle), but you washed him on accident and all the flax seed expanded. You felt weird cutting him open and digging out wet flax seed, but he’d been with you through some tough times and you’re a sucker for sentiment. 

Most people you know use flavored vape pens or limit their smoking habits to weed, but you’d grown up watching your parents and grandparents smoking cigarettes - you want to smell the nicotine in the air and feel the burn in your lungs and get nostalgic flashes of hugging your mother in her favorite ratty sweatshirt. Plus, you’re a little extra.  

You light up, grateful you pulled the smoke detector out of the wall months ago, and close your eyes. You try to hold the smoke in for a number of seconds that your father would approve of, and open your eyes when you cough it out prematurely; you don’t really smoke that often, you had planned to go your whole life without smoking, in fact, like a fucking nerd, but the last few years have tried you. Therapy has been training you not to aim your destructive feelings at yourself, but you don’t like snapping at your loved ones or breaking your possessions (it’s only satisfying if it shatters, but then you have to clean up a fuckton of glass) so you usually try to exercise it out of yourself. You’re a runner now. As your joints get creaky, your gut gets crampy,  and your neck and your hairline get sweaty, you imagine pouring boiling water over his face and firing your fists into every square inch of him that you can reach until your knuckles break. This makes you run faster.  

But you can’t leave it all on the treadmill every time, and you can only up your antidepressant dose in 25 mg increments. One of your friends in high school used to cut themselves - you’d see neat little etches down their forearms when they took off their jacket - and so eventually you started to do it too. You used to tell yourself that  slicing into your shins and your thighs with your Venus razor was pretty much the same kind of self-harm that doing drugs was, but as you got older it didn’t ring as true. Probably because when you began to internalize the advice from the therapists who told you to treat yourself like you would treat your friends, cutting yourself started feeling like proof that you could cut someone else—someone who matters more to you than you do. 

So you smoke a cigarette when you feel like finding a razor and you try not to think about those John Green quotes about cigarettes that Middle School You thought were the deepest of deep, “Y'all smoke to enjoy it. I smoke to die,” but you think about them anyway and you cringe at yourself a bit even though you still like John Green. 

You’ve been trying to train yourself out of cringing—to give more weight to the things you like rather than the things you don’t, and to fight judgmental tendencies like making faces when people talk about how good they think Stranger Things is, no matter how off the rails you think the second season was.  

Being judgmental reminds you of him. (The ex you want to beat with a golf club, not John Green). 

He (again, the ex) could make you drop a word from your vocabulary after one snarky comment, “you sure have been saying that word a lot;” he could make you feel like you should stop eating three square meals a day, “have you tried counting calories;” and after you did keep your portions small and started working out, he still made you feel like you should work out more regardless,“are you sure you want to wear that?” You almost never played your music in front of him, and if you really liked a show then you knew better than to show it to him.  

Your chest starts to tighten as the initial stirrings you tried to avoid start up again. His mattress was on the floor when he did it. Your body goes cold and your breath catches, even though this is the millionth time you’ve thought about how he didn’t stop—although now you get to add on what the prosecutor said he said in his ‘confession’, and you want to take your car and drive it through his ground floor apartment’s sliding glass door. He was good at manipulating you, why shouldn’t he be good at manipulating the police too? Manipulating himself, probably. His memory is very convenient in terms of keeping his actions out of the third degree felony category.  

You got rid of the clothes he liked you in, the gifts he gave you for your birthday and for Christmas, the photos you had of your trip to meet his family. You try to stay away from the places you used to go together on campus, and even food you ate together, shows you watched together, music you listened to together. Hearing his name still makes you bristle like a ghost has decided to give you a hug.  

But there are always little things like this and there always will be. You can make a big deal out of it and get a ride to Walmart for a new bed frame - set it up tonight and elevate your mattress so that you won’t have another reason to think about it, about him. But in the end, you know there will have to be similarities and reminders of him and your relationship and what he did, and trying to escape those for the rest of your life will only make you think about it all more than you already do. 

Ceilings leak and landlords hustle and apparently boyfriends rape. But this is still your leaky-ceiling’d apartment. Your room. Your bed. Your body. You finish your cigarette and listen to a podcast on your naked mattress until you fall asleep.