There’s an old Sikh saying: “If you have never lived through horrors that is living in a sharehouse in your early 20s, you have not fully lived.” I might be misremembering that quote a bit, but I think the point still stands. I lived in a sharehouse for one summer, and what an experience that was. Mind you, I had never shared a house with people I had not met before, nor was that something I actively aspired to do. However, due to me getting a job in another city during my college studies, I was planning to move to that particular city and I needed a relatively cheap residence for a couple of months. Luckily the local student housing organization leased rooms in sharehouses to out-of-towners during summer breaks between graduates moving out in the spring and new students moving in in the fall. The sharehouse I got a room in was quite far from the city center, but I prefer living closer to nature than the shopping street anyway. For just a few hundred euros per month, the house was exactly in the shape you might expect, but I was okay with that too. Paint peeling off the walls and a few leaky pipes are part of that deal in my books. I’ve lived bleaker before. How I had not lived before, however, was with two complete strangers I met on the day I moved in.

The sharehouse I moved into was already occupied by two students a couple younger than me. I was about 23 or 24, and at that time I was already passed that line into responsible adulthood where I ate properly, cleaned regularly and managed my finances in a sustainable way. As I would come to find out, these two were younger than me, and unfortunately had yet to meet my standards for coexistence. The room I rented was between theirs and adjacent to the common room that also worked as a kitchen. As you came through the front door, you would enter the short corridor, which had two doors, which lead to the bathroom and Roommate Number One’s room respectively. Beyond the corridor was the common room that had two doors; one to my room and one to Roommate Number Two’s room. So as you can imagine, I had a good vantage point to both of my roommates’ daily lives.

Let’s talk about Roommate Number One, whom I’ll title Chimney. I’ll call him that, for the only times I saw him in broad daylight let alone at all was when he went smoking next to our front door. Chimney was slim and pale and kept to himself for the most part. He regularly kept his door closed, so even when I went to the bathroom and passed his room I could only wonder what was going on inside. Chimney liked video games, that much was certain. He often chose past midnight to be the perfect time to audibly chat with his chums and organize raids, a time I had chosen to dedicate to sleeping. Other than that and the smoking habit, Chimney rarely caused any friction in our roommateship.

And now we come to Roommate Number Two. I have more to tell you about him than Chimney, so I’m having a hard time choosing a name. Based on his most notable quality, I’ll call him the Baguette Whisperer, or BW for short. Now, BW was your stereotypical socially awkward quiet guy. Not taking care of his looks by even trimming his larval-stage neckbeard or wearing non-stained t-shirts, he was quite a sight to behold. Whenever the door to his room was ajar, I could only see darkness, and occasionally the shine from a screen of some description. His diet consisted of frozen meals. More often than not, if we happened to occupy the kitchen at the same time, I would be frying chicken on a pan or slicing bell peppers, and he would be peeking in the oven to see if his frozen baguette had heated up to appropriate levels. He would then grab his greasy treat and waddle back into the safety of his own room to watch the regional equivalent of the show Neighbours. And, every time without failure, if he entered the common room and saw me there, he would exhale sharply like he had just returned from a ten-kilometer jog. For the first three or four times I was nonplussed and even confronted him about it once, but then I figured out that was his way of acknowledging my presence without having to say hello to me in his own awkward way.

This all seems pretty standard for a socially awkward guy who has yet to grasp the responsibilities that come with adulthood, right? The strangest part comes next. I already told you how he behaved if he entered the room that I was already in, but it was even more fascinating if I entered the room that he was already in. To give you context, there was a large birch just outside my window covering it, so even with the window open the air flow was bad. If it was a hot day, I kept the door to my room open or at least ajar, so with the common room window open the air would flow in and out better. The important part is, normally my door was not closed, and therefore I could enter the common room without making a sound.

If that ever happened, and BW was there “preparing” his meal, I would witness something intriguing. I would slip out through my door and see BW looking in the oven, his back turned to me, mumbling to himself. The first time I saw this I was perplexed to the extent of not wanting to alert him to my presence. There he was, hunched over the oven, watching his baguette and whispering quietly. I could never hear exactly what he was saying, but witnessing it made me feel a weird kinship towards Dian Fossey. After finishing with his preparations, he would turn around and find me standing behind him at my door. Then he would go through his usual exhalation routine, and quickly slip back into his room. This happened every time I caught him in the common room during dinner time, and after the first couple of times I made sure to loudly turn the handle on my door before entering just to spare him the embarrassment.

Before concluding my story, I would state what might come to you as the obvious, but I was the only person in the household who cared about the cleanliness of the common room, or even our private rooms, as it seemed. The vacuum cleaner would always be in the same spot to the millimeter where I had left it after I had finished using it the previous time. During my first month there, I got fed up how slowly the bathroom sink was draining and decided to open up the pipes. To my shock, the pipe was clogged with a couple, lovely injection needles. After confronting Chimney about it he told me they most likely belonged to the previous occupant of my room, who had a few problems in his life. During that conversation, it was brought up to me that the year-old brochures by the local church and the Communist Party on the kitchen table were also remnants of his life there.

I left at the end of the summer to return to my college city. I did not see Chimney that day. Maybe it was not time for his cigarette break on the moment of my exit. I did see the Baguette Whisperer and told him good luck. For the first time during my stay there, he actually rose to acceptable standards of social interaction and told me the same. That has been to date my weirdest living experience, but I don’t regret a moment I spent there. What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, they say. It might not necessarily be completely accurate, but I came out of that arrangement a mentally richer man.