The Life and Times of the Curious Cockroach

Written: February 2nd, 2009
Location: Brussels
Note: here the word “morning” is used loosely

It’s 3:20pm, and you’ve just rolled out of bed. You squint your eyes against the sunlight.  You massage your aching head. You hobble over to the bathroom for some water, and catch a look at yourself in the mirror. You jump back, startled at the sight. You forget why you’re in the bathroom in the first place.

Gradually your eyes become accustomed to the light, and you start to regain normal function. First order of the day is finding your pants. You wade through the piles of clothing in your room, slowly, arduously, clinging to your floor lamp for support — here you can easily be mistaken for a sloth climbing through the thick jungles of the Amazon.

You never do find your pants, but you unearth plenty of other note-worthy objects along the way. You find a cobblestone in your handbag, for one. Curiously enough, it looks just like the type of cobblestones that line the main square of Brussels. Curiously enough, you were at the main square of Brussels last night. Oh. And then it all starts coming back to you: your intense beer-tasting session … your new exchange friends … your failed attempt to speak French … your second beer-tasting session (you’re a fierce cultural explorer, after all!) …  your astronomically successful attempt to speak Finnish (or so you thought) …  your public declaration that you’ve always wanted to be an archaeologist and you can’t imagine doing anything else in life … hence the cobblestone?

Now you’re all alone in your room, but you still blush. You look around at your surroundings, as if seeing everything for the first time. The first few months of your new life abroad have flashed by in a blur.

In the life of the typical exchange student, there comes a moment of realization. At some point between your arrival at the airport and the fiasco at last night’s bar, you’ve changed. You’ve come to a country of perfect strangers, and the usual constraints (parents, everyday responsibilities, strict drinking laws, etc) are conveniently located back home, thousands of kilometers away. Perhaps you’ve blossomed. Perhaps you’ve withered. Or perhaps you’ve become an entirely different creature altogether. And it seems like every day you wake up to discover a new and exciting part of yourself. This morning it was the Closeted Archaeologist. The day before that, it was the Closeted Political Activist. Tomorrow morning it’ll be something else entirely.

Now, dear Reader, I offer you a selection of personas  I discovered while living in Brussels. The list may or may not be exhaustive. Parents: you can stop reading here. Colleagues: ditto. Grandparents: thank goodness you don’t speak English.

‘

The Closeted Philosopher
Email to long-distance boyfriend:

I miss you Gilligan. There is a giant party going on around me. I just talked to a philosopher. It was sad, very very sad. I am sad, Gilligan. You think I’m an optimist. I am. But only because I know that life, in itself, is very sad. La vie, en soi, est tragique. Tragic. The only way to fight its intrinsic tragedy is to be optimistic. Maybe that makes a person naive. Maybe I am naive. But how is it so that I know that life is sad yet still fight against it. How is it so?

Yours (but for how long?),
Roachy

The Closeted Poet
Another email to long-distance boyfriend:

Hips don’t lie
I want you like pie
You’re my type of guy
And that’s no lie

I’ll cover you with rye
And do it like Bill Nye
(The Science Guy)
And till then, bye bye.

Love,
Roachy-pie

The Closeted Conceptual Artist
Email to sibling:

Oh my god. What the f*** went on last night. Woke up this morning, room looked like explosion at the spaghetti factory, clothing and books and dried pasta everywhere. And get this: in the middle of all this mess, my desk is spotlessly clean. As in, wiped-down-with-soap-and-ammonia kind of clean. There’s nothing on the desk, except: one dried anchovy, three strands of human hair, and one post-it note with my own handwriting on it, saying: “Dear Roachy: I will always love you. Love, Roachy”.

???????

And with that, dear Reader, I will be signing off. There’s a cobblestone in urgent need of reburial.