He Wears Toe Shoes, I Wear High Heels
Like a lot of people, I put thought into what I was going to wear on the first day of school. Even if it was technically a move-in day, my top priority was looking good. I put on my lucky jeans-- the ones that really show off my assets. I put on a suede jacket rescued from a Goodwill bin, loose buttons and all. And, of course, I put on my favorite pair of brogue spike heels, manual labor be damned.
Like most college students, I was randomly paired with my roommate. He and I had talked over email before school started, and it seemed for all intents and purposes that we had a lot in common. We were both in theater in high school and we both had a fairly dry sense of humor. I was still pretty nervous about living with a roommate: some stranger sleeping in the same room as me, some rando being in my space with access to all my stuff. I’d heard a lot of horror stories from friends and family, but I was trying to be optimistic.
Unlike a lot of people, presumably, my optimism was destroyed by quite possibly the most hideous footwear known to man. My roommate wears toe shoes, those rubbery foot condoms which allot a pocket for every single toe. Every. Single. Toe. Around 10 years ago, they were marketed as better for your feet, for replicating the experience of walking and running barefoot, but this claim has since been proven false. Given that my roommate isn’t an uneducated 50-year-old man with a ponytail, I was forced to assume that he must be a sadist.
It seems a lot of people have an expectation that their roommate is going to be their friend, maybe even their best friend. Most freshmen arrive at college not knowing a single person, and their roommate is often both one of the first people they meet and a person they’re around all the time. It’s easy to hope for the best, especially when there’s so many unknowns. I tried really hard not to be one of those people, but it’s only natural to find something known to tie your expectations to before you get to school.
But like a lot of people, my roommate and I are not best friends. We’re not really friends at all. Honestly, we just exist in the same space. Toe shoes and high heels couldn’t be more different kinds of footwear, but at the end of the day, all the shoes end up on the same floor and the two of us end up in the same beds. We smile at each other, and try not to get in each other’s way. We both do our best to keep our room clean. Sure, I find his choice of shoes abhorrent, and I’m sure he has his own feelings about my fashion sense. That’s what roommates are like, ultimately. For a lot of people, you just coexist.
