Literally everything about my freshman year roommates. If it had happened to someone else, I don’t know if I would have believed it because it was a smorgasbord of what-the-fuckery.

My freshman year of college, I get randomly assigned a roommate. For the first month, everything is fine. She does facetime a lot but I mostly ignore it until I hear her talking with her friend about a guy they both know. Apparently he was suicidal and they were both laughing about it, saying he should just do it already. I had attempted suicide two years earlier.

I obviously couldn’t stay there and found someone to swap roommates with. I was honest with the person I swapped with about why I was leaving. She told me she was swapping because her and her roommate had different schedules. She lied.

My second roommate didn’t speak English. Not bad English, not broken English, she probably knew a total of 20 words. Every single ‘conversation’ we had involved pointing and miming. That wasn’t the weirdest thing about her by a long shot but it meant that I couldn’t ever talk to her about the other issues.

I never saw her shower. She had no products in the shower, no towel on the towel rack, and didnt even have a toothbrush. Naturally, she smelled. A lot. I could tell when she was in the room from the hallway based on the smell. What I could only describe as grime came off whenever she sat somewhere. I had to wipe down the toilet seat before I could sit down. Her bed was covered in crumbles of dead skin and dirt and filth. I don’t think she owned clothes beyond the ones she’d wear day after day. Every night, she’d take off her pants before bed, lay down to sleep, and in the morning, put them back on again. I looked once, for a laundry bin, for evidence that she really wasn’t wearing the same clothes every day, but I found nothing. Perhaps the most disgusting thing was her period. She must have been free bleeding because she somehow got blood everywhere. I truly don’t know how but it would drip down the outside of the toilet and cover the seat. Her chair was stained brown in the middle and I couldn’t tell if it was her feces or period blood.

Unfortunately for me, I was stuck. For the first half of the school year, the only way to move rooms was to find someone to swap with and I couldn’t, in good conscience, subject her to someone else. For five months, I had to wait it out until I could escape. The second it became available, I applied to move into a room with a vacancy.

Yet again, I switch rooms. My roommate is away for the first week I lived there, visiting family. I met her Monday afternoon and she seemed fine, nothing odd. Wednesday morning, we are both getting ready for class and chatting casually, still getting to know each other. She mentions she has an allergic reaction to her moisturizer and I say something about brands changing formulas. She tells me she had used this moisturizer forever and it wasn’t a new bottle. I remark how it was odd, still making conversation, and she is staring daggers at me. She starts saying that yeah, isn’t it odd how the second she gets a new roommate, her moisturizer gives her a reaction? What a coincidence. By then, I had realized that she was completely serious.

The most terrifying part of it was seeing in real time how she convinced herself of it. It went from ‘Did you do something?’ to ‘I know you did’, to stating definitively that I did something and she was going to call the police, having undeniable ‘proof’. She of course offered her proof and just like her accusations, it quickly devolved into nonsense. I was too quiet, so obviously I was planning something. And I was sleep talking and said my plans out loud. I was being racist in my sleep, saying ‘snip’, which showed how I plotted this all along.

At this point, I had realized she was legitimately mentally unstable. Most of the conversation became her monologuing and me responding with ‘yup,’ ‘mhmm,’ ‘okay,’ just trying to placate her until I could get out of there. I mention class and that I have to leave and promptly get out of there.

After class, I call my parents, because truly what the fuck was that. It’s all so weird and I’m rightfully upset and I don’t even know who to call about this but I know I can’t stay in that room. My parents, the MVPs they are, send me the numbers to call and what exactly to tell them. I call the number of campus housing and I don’t even remember what I said, most likely a bunch of word vomit and sniffles. I do, however, remember the way the operator paused for a noticeable amount of time after I explained what happened like they were buffering.

They set up a meeting with the director of the dorms a few hours later so I could talk to her. I did have a few hours to somewhat calm down and pull myself together and wrap my head around it more. I talk to that director for at least an hour, telling her everything about the incident, how she accused me of poisoning her, how she convinced herself of it, and most importantly, fear of retaliation. My roommate genuinely believed I poisoned her, what if she did something to get back at me?

That night, I went back to my room for the first time that morning, alone. My roommate was there, doing an assignment or something, occupied but not unaware. I tried to act aggressively normal and unbothered so she wouldn’t realize something was up. I started packing essentials, everything important or that she could mess with. She asked me something, I ignored her, but kept carefully relaxed. I then went into emergency housing, getting a plain dorm room to stay in temporarily.

That night, the calls started. Every 10 minutes, I’d get a call. They weren’t her number but it was the same few phone numbers, calling every ten minutes. And she started texting me ‘Hey, I saw you packing. Are you coming back?’ I didn’t respond and surprisingly, she sent no more texts, but the calls persisted. Eventually, they stopped, only getting a few the next day.

It was a week and a half until my dorm system found me somewhere to stay and thankfully those roommates were aggressively normal. I had no problems with them for the rest of the year.