The Ballad of Joe Yogurtsack: A True Story of Fear, Friendship, Theft, and the Worst Roommate I Ever Had

The first time I met Joe, he was standing in the middle of my kitchen, offering me stolen yogurt from a large black garbage bag.

The kitchen was in Minneapolis, where I was renting a portion of a house while I interned downtown. The food, he told me proudly, he had lifted from the breakfast buffet of a nearby hotel. The man was my new housemate.

I told him no thank you.

“Are you sure?”

Yes, Joe.

“It’s free.”

That’s okay.

“Seriously, you don’t want anything? There’s pastries and fruit in here too.”

He shook the garbage bag enticingly. I said I wasn’t hungry. Joe acted like I’d formally declared myself an enemy of all forms of fun and whimsy.

It’s possible I said no a few more times, but when it became clear he wasn’t going to let me say no, I took an apple.

“That’s it? One piece of fruit?”

For some reason, the house had two separate working refrigerators. I put the apple in the fridge I’d been using, and then we made small talk.

He asked what I did for fun. I told him I cooked and wrote songs. He told me he cooked and wrote poetry, that he’d found it was a great way to impress the ladies.

“Oh,” I said, trying to turn the subject away from Joe’s sex life, “my music’s not like that. It’s mostly about angry robots and space and stuff.”

“That would impress me,” he said. I took a step backwards. There was something intimidating about Joe. He was big, a foot taller than me and barrel-chested, with greasy hair and hooded eyes. He loomed. “Hey, can I get your input on something?” he added. “I haven’t decided which room in the house I want. The downstairs room’s smaller but it’s got a fireplace. Don’t you think that would work on women?”

“What?” I said.

“You know, if a guy brought you home, and he had a fireplace in his room, and there was a fire to cuddle up in front of…”

I tried to picture this hypothetical woman. Would he make her eat from a garbage bag, too? Joe was a complete stranger; she at least was part of the sisterhood. ‘Girl, get out while you still can,’ I thought.

Gchat with my brother, February 13 2013:

me: like, dude, i am not your one-person committee on advice for getting you laid

we met like five minutes ago

i don’t know that might just be me being a cranky hater-of-things

Casey: haha well your response is excellent

me: what i actually said was “depends on the guy”

which seemed polite enough while also saying a fireplace is not a personality

Casey: Honestly I know some cads who are extremely enjoyable, good hearted people who would’ve meant it jokingly and made that clear

but yogurtsack sounds like he’s probably a pretty straightforward guy

a man with a garbage bag full of yogurt is probably more adept with scavenging than subtext

me: yeah and i want to stress that i don’t think he was hitting on me, it was just uncomfortable

Casey: oh no, yeah

me: by the way he is yogurtsack forever in my brain now

Casey: Dannonbags was a runner up

me: also a contender but i think you picked the winner

“Hey,” said Joe Yogurtsack, two weeks later, “come into my room, I want to show you something.”

I crossed the hallway and hovered awkwardly in his doorway. “No,” he said, “come in.” I couldn’t think of a polite way to refuse, so I took a step inside. The air was thick with spraypaint fumes, hazy. I coughed. He proudly showed me the piece of wood he’d spraypainted white, the duvet he’d stolen from a hotel room.

“That’s theft,” I said.

“It’s a big company, they won’t notice,” he said.

I pointed out that if anyone was going to get in trouble for missing stuff, it would probably be, say, the cleaning staff. He scoffed. I coughed again.

“Can you open a window?” I asked.

“I tried,” he said, “they’re stuck.”

I coughed, involuntary, and covered my mouth with my sleeve.

“It’s not that bad,” he snapped. “If it bothers you that much, maybe you should leave.”

Awesome. I walked out the door as fast as I could.

He followed me down the hallway and into my room.

“Can I come in?” he said from the middle of my floor.

“Well,” I said, “I mean, it’s pretty messy in here and I’m not really set up to — ”

“Oh, I don’t mind,” Joe told me, magnanimous. He moved to inspect my books. “Hey, lend me a book,” he said. “Lend me your favorite book.”

I explained that my parents were still holding onto my stuff, and I’d mostly taken whatever I hadn’t read yet.

“What,” he said. He was angry again. “Do you not trust me to give it back?”

When it became clear he was not going to let me say no to this, either, I pulled a book off the shelf at random and handed it to him. It was a used book I’d bought for a class, visibly falling apart. He frowned at the tattered cover and read the title out loud.

“I’ll read this and then we can talk about it,” he said. Joe walked out of my room and returned moments later with another book. “Here.” He pushed it towards me. “It’s about a woman who goes on a walkabout in Australia — ”

“Thanks, but — ” I started.

“Read it,” said Joe. “It’s the last book my mom got me before she died. It’s so meaningful to me.”

“I don’t think I’ll have enough free time,” I said.

“Come on,” he said, “it’s a quick read and it’s really, really important to me.”

“I’m very busy,” I said. “I’m not sure I’ll — ”

“Come on,” he said.

This was only the second time we’d ever really had a conversation, but I was already sensing a theme.

“I was actually just leaving,” I said. He followed me down the stairs and into the kitchen.

“Yeah, my mom’s death hit me really hard,” he told me. “It was a couple of years ago, but my parents divorced when I was a kid and I was always closer with her. Of course, after the divorce, she got really feminist and angry at men, so that made things hard with us.”

I felt honor-bound to defend the movement that gave me the legal right to be treated like a human being, but he was a lot bigger than me, and he was standing between me and the door.

“That’s not how, uh, that’s not what feminism is,” I mumbled.

“Well, she was bitter about men,” Joe said. “Then she died, and it was so hard. I started taking pills, just to cope. For a while, I would lie in bed and take pills and hope I didn’t get up in the morning.”

May I repeat: second-ever conversation.

“Oh, sorry,” said Joe, “am I making you uncomfortable?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Because I really like talking about these kinds of things with my friends,” he continued. “I’m the kind of guy who — if there’s ever anything you want to talk about, you can talk to me.”

He was still between me and the door, but I’m small — five foot two — and I had adrenaline on my side, a panicky social claustrophobia rising up in my throat. Maybe if I moved fast —

“You seem like a really interesting person,” he said. “I’m looking forward to getting to know you better.”

“Uh, well,” I said, “I’m actually gonna be working a lot, so I don’t know how much I’ll be around — ”

And Joe leaned in and said, in a loud stage whisper, with exaggerated patience, “This is where you’re supposed to compliment me back.”

My mind went blank. It wasn’t just that I didn’t think I owed him that. My ability to lie had deserted me. Words wouldn’t come.

Finally, I stammered something about how hard it was to give compliments on cue. I laughed uncomfortably. Joe laughed too.

He leaned closer, effectively caging me against the refrigerator. “Compliment me, dammit!” he shouted. “Make me feel good about myself!”

It was a joke. I could tell it was a joke. The thing is, it was also happening. I cowered against the cold enamel — head ducked, shoulders pulled back tight. It was a joke, but I meant it, too.

Joe chose this moment to clue back into how uncomfortable I was. “Hey,” he said, “It’s okay. Here, give me a hug.” He held his arms out.

My heart was still beating in my ears.

“No thank you,” I said.

“What?” he snapped. “No, come on, I’m not gonna try anything — ”

I winced. “I just don’t know you well enough to — ”

“What,” said Joe, full of disdain, “like you only hug guys you know really well?”

In that moment I realized he wasn’t going to let me say no to this, either. I also realized that I didn’t care.

“Yeah,” I said, ducking away. “And I’m kind of an introvert, so I don’t always feel comfortable opening up.”

I walked out of the kitchen. Joe followed me.

He laughed. “You know,” he said, “you’re really awkward.”

To be honest, I didn’t disagree. I am awkward. I’m shy and anxious and terrified of lulls in a conversation. I overanalyze. I worry obsessively about coming off as creepy, about seeming weird or stupid or boring. Sometimes when strangers or acquaintances talk to me, I can hear a voice in the back of my head going, ‘MAKE YOUR FACE LOOK NORMAL. MAKE YOUR FACE DO NORMAL FACE-THINGS. REACT CORRECTLY TO THIS SENTENCE. MORE NORMAL. MORE NORMAL.’

Even so, given the circumstances, it felt like an incredible thing to say, and my annoyance briefly overcame my fear.

“Um, so the one thing you should never say when someone seems awkward — ” I started.

“ — is tell them they’re awkward? Yeah, I know,” said Joe. “You remind me of a friend of mine, she’s really pretty but she’s awkward, and she’s always saying, ‘Oh my god, I’m so awkward!’ so I guess I don’t even think of it as a bad thing.”

“Uh, okay,” I said. I walked faster. I reached the stairs and bolted for my room.

“Okay, you can flee now,” Joe called after me.

Once again, we were in agreement.

I locked myself in my room. ‘That was nothing,’ I thought. ‘He didn’t even touch you. Grow up.’ But my heart wouldn’t stop racing. Every creak of floorboards made me jump. When I couldn’t take it anymore, I grabbed my computer, my dying cell phone, and my charger, and made a dash for the Espresso Royale a few blocks away.

The cafe was an hour from closing. The only free power outlet was in the hall on the way to the bathroom. I crouched next to the bathroom door, plugged in my phone, and took a few deep breaths.

A Brief Aside, Because Joe Brought it Up:

For the record, I don’t think feminism is required to market itself to men, to soothe and cater to male egos. Feminism has other priorities, in the same way that the gay rights movement does not owe it to straight folks like me to make us feel comfortable. It would be like walking into the only vegan restaurant in town and demanding they fix you a steak: that’s not why that space exists.

That said:

Men are like fifty percent of the population. They’re my friends and my loved ones and they write stories I love and they write music I care about and their voices are fundamentally inescapable in our society. Sexism is a real and pervasive problem, but if I genuinely thought men were all monsters, I wouldn’t be a feminist, I’d be a hermit. I’d swear off society and live in a cave and survive on berries and howl at the moon.

I’m a feminist because I think change is worth fighting for, because I believe that if we teach men how to listen and question their assumptions, they are totally capable of recognizing when shit is fucked up and helping us build that brighter future.

To imply it’s a woman’s fault for being harassed or attacked is to imply that men are beneath the concept of self-control. To say that a woman crossing the street in a short dress is like waving raw meat at a dog is to call men dogs.

Can we agree women don’t have the corner on reason or compassion? Is it so wild to say that men have it within themselves to treat us like human beings? (Granted: not all men.)

Anyway, that night, when I was shaking terrified on the unwashed tile floor of an Espresso Royale, the first person I thought to call was my brother.

It took a while to explain what had happened. Every time a person walked by, which was often, because again, I was camped out in a coffee shop between both bathrooms, fear shot from the pit of my stomach into my palms and I jerked up. I kept checking their faces to make sure that Joe hadn’t followed me here, that he wasn’t listening in, that — what? What did I think was going to happen? It was unclear. My fear couldn’t be reasoned with because it didn’t just live in my head, it lived in my whole body and also beyond it.

The other reason it took so long to tell the story was that the second I started talking, I was doubting myself all over again. I’d recently been diagnosed with generalized anxiety, and although part of me continues to resist this label, whispers that the diagnosis was imprecise and maybe I’m just awful and looking for a convenient excuse to pin it on, there were pieces that fit.

The crying jags, for instance. The way one bad social interaction can send me staring into a bottomless void. Also, y’know, all the anxiety.

Was this just my paranoid brain conjuring false alarms? Was it really so bad? Nobody ever made a Lifetime movie about a girl with crappy social skills trying to turn down a hug. Joe had acted with total assurance. I was still learning how to navigate the knowledge that my brain can be an unreliable narrator.

He hadn’t threatened me. Again, he hadn’t touched me. He hadn’t explicitly hit on me. Maybe he was fine and I really was awkward and weird and crazy —

“You don’t owe that fucking asshole anything,” my brother told me. “Anything, okay?”

There’s basically no way I wasn’t crying.

Strangers kept staring as they walked by, like they’d never had a minor mental and emotional breakdown just outside an Espresso Royale bathroom, like that’s not essentially the human condition.

“I’m so scared,” I said. “I know that makes no sense — ”

“It’s a scary situation,” he said. “If you want to stay at a hotel tonight — ”

“That seems over the top,” I told him. “I mean, nothing happened. But I keep thinking, in an hour this place closes and I have to go back and he’ll be there and what if I have to see him again, and talk to him, and what will he say, and — ”

“I fucking hate this guy,” Casey kept saying. “I fucking hate him so much.”

In an unfamiliar city with my cellphone sweaty against my ear, it felt like a hug.

“Look,” said Casey, “call me when you’re a block from your house and I’ll stay on the phone with you until you’re back in your room.”

“It’ll be midnight, that’s one AM your time,” I said.

“I don’t care,” he said.

“What’ll we talk about?” I said, and then Casey did the best thing he could’ve done at that moment: he started riffing. We brainstormed what my side of the conversation should be, walking through the rooms Joe might be lurking in.

“‘What, Casey? You’re polishing all your ninja stars? But Casey, that’s SO MANY NINJA STARS. Man, my psychotically overprotective older brother, I know you have lightning-quick reflexes but I still think if you want to tend to all your weapons right now you’re gonna have to let something slide, like that anger management class the courts made you take after that last time you attacked a dude who tried to hug me.’”

You get the picture.

By the end of it, I was laughing.

“I wish I could do more,” said Casey.

I told him that he really had helped. “I’m gonna wear your anger on my behalf like a warm coat,” I said.

“Fuck that,” said my brother. “Wear it like fucking armor.”

It’s something that’s always stuck with me. If I never accomplish anything else in life, may my love and indignation be armor for my friends.

I made it home that night without seeing Joe. I locked my door, and kept it locked any time when I was inside. I didn’t know it, but in a way, the scariest part had already passed. Joe would never scream at me against the fridge again. He would never touch me.

This is not a story about a girl in danger. Not necessarily.

“Where are you going?” said Joe in the hallway.

“The YMCA,” I said.

“Can I come with? I was thinking about joining.”

“Uh, man, I don’t know, I have errands first,” I said, “I’m gonna be pretty busy.”

And I was busy: busy inventing errands.

Joe invited me to see a movie with him. He invited me to go to the mall. Turning him down made me feel mean and unfriendly, but on the other hand: it seemed like he should’ve gotten the message eventually.

I was angry about it, too, but I couldn’t tell if that was reasonable. I didn’t have any friends, so I’d run it by an imaginary audience in my head:

“And he keeps inviting me to do stuff!”

“So?” they said.

“He acts like I’m messed up for saying no, but isn’t it just as weird to put me in a position where I have to keep saying no over and over? Can’t he just accept it that I don’t want to spend time with him, that even if that’s uncool of me it’s still a decision I’m allowed to make? It’s like he thinks he can force us to be buddies if he just wears me down enough, it’s creepy.”

“You could say yes,” they said.

“I don’t fucking owe this guy my friendship,” I said. “All he’s done is ignore all my social signals and try to make me eat garbage.”

“Bitch,” they said. Having anxiety is kind of like having a YouTube comments section built into your brain.

“I’m scared,” I said.

“You’re a straight white cisgender upper-middle class girl living in a low-crime area with a decent job,” They said. “You had a safe childhood. Your family loves you. You are impossibly privileged. Suck it up.” Having anxiety is also like having certain elements of tumblr built into your brain.

No matter what I did, I couldn’t shake the nagging sense that I didn’t have the right to be angry or afraid. But I couldn’t shake the anger or the fear either.

At night I’d lie awake, listening to his footsteps in the hallway, creaking towards my door and then away again.

I said I didn’t have friends, but that’s not really true. I had plenty of friends, good friends, all the lovely and wonderful people I’d met in Ann Arbor, who had since scattered across the country but who kept in touch through the normal computer means.

But I didn’t know anyone in the city, and so my day to day reality was very lonely.

At work, I was the only person in my department on my floor, meaning I’d go weeks without seeing any of my coworkers face-to-face. Frequently the longest in-person conversation I had was with the barista who handed me my latte in the morning.

It is very difficult to make friends as a newcomer in Minneapolis. I know this, not only from experience but because it’s something I was told, repeatedly, by other people living in Minneapolis.

“Oh, that’s so brave of you, moving out here by yourself. It’s awfully hard to meet people here. We’ve lived in the city for seven years, and all I can say is, thank god for my sisters and my husband and our small but extremely tight-knit circle of close friends.”

And then they would smile tightly, all softly closed doors, and I would stare into the void for a while, and then I would go home and drink wine and talk to my pre-existing friends on google hangouts and wonder, maudlin and slightly drunk, if this was going to be the rest of my life because I could not see a way forward that involved finding another human being who would care if I lived or died.

For a while, the fear subsided, not because Joe got less creepy but because I got distracted by what a generally bad roommate he was. It’s hard to fear someone if you don’t respect them.

He left piles of dirty dishes in the sink. He wandered around shirtless, his pale, hairy belly flopping out, ass crack visible to the world. He knocked on my door and asked to borrow money. He smoked in the house, which wasn’t allowed in the lease. He smoked in the living room, which was directly below my room, so that I’d wake up in the middle of the night, coughing. I am not a tidy person, but he left messes that verged on downright bizarre.

“Can you please clean up after yourself?” I asked.

“I feel like any time you start a conversation, it’s to scold me,” he said.

“Joe, you left blueberry yogurt smeared on the hallway floor,” I said. “What do you want me to say?”

Then there was the cheese thing.

Like I said, inexplicably the kitchen had two fridges, and we’d each claimed our own. One day, I discovered I was missing an entire block of cheddar. I hadn’t even opened it, but it was gone. Feeling like a crazy person, I checked Joe’s fridge. It wasn’t there either.

Joe wandered into the kitchen, wearing only a pair of grimy jeans with a hole at the crotch. “I hate to even ask this,” I said, “but do you know where my cheese went?”

“Oh,” he said, “I was gonna leave a note to tell you, but yeah, the other day I needed some cheese and I saw you had some, so I figured I’d buy you a new one later.”

“Um, can you please ask me first next time?” I said. “I thought I was going nuts.”

“You’re not nuts,” he said, “I just — I needed an egg, and then I noticed you had cheese — ”

“Please don’t use my eggs without asking either?”

“Well, I was making pancakes,” said Joe, “so I needed an egg.”

“Okay,” I said. “But don’t.”

“Well, maybe it wasn’t pancakes, actually,” he stammered. “I think — actually it was ice.”

“Why were you looking for ice in my fridge? That would be some warm ice.”

Joe said nothing.

“What were you making that needed a whole package of cheese at once?” I asked.

“It wasn’t a very big package,” he said.

Eight ounces is half a pound of cheese. “It’s way more than one serving, though.”

“But a serving size is tiny,” said Joe dismissively. “I made one sandwich and it used, like, a third of a block — ”

He’d made one sandwich and then also eaten the other two-thirds. I frowned.

“Sorry,” he said, “I forget that not everyone is as laidback as me about using other people’s stuff.”

Laidback about using other people’s stuff.

When he invaded my personal space, my anger had been complicated, tentative, full of caveats and second-guessing and excuses. When he invaded my cheese, my anger was swift and absolute. Read into that what you will.

“Well, it’s good we had this conversation,” I told him, “so you know now that you need to ask me before you go through my belongings or eat my food.”

“Okay,” he said, sulkily.

“Okay,” I said.

Laidback about using other people’s stuff. Laidback.

Joe continued to steal my food but maybe you saw that coming.

And then some of it was just weird.

Like the time he moved all of his dry goods to a shelf I’d been using and transferred mine to an empty shelf so high that I couldn’t touch it on my tiptoes.

“I rearranged the kitchen,” he said. “What do you think?”

“You can reach this and I can’t,” I said. “Can you store your stuff up here?”

“There’s a step stool,” he said, pointing to a small fold-up ladder leaning against the wall.

“Yes, or we could each keep our stuff where we can reach.”

“It’s not hard to use the step stool,” he said. “Try it.”

“We literally have the option of storing things so that neither of us needs it.”

“Come on,” he said. I shook my head. “Why won’t you at least try it? Climb up there. Here, I’ll help you use it.” Joe reached out his hand. He was still much bigger than me. He still had no concept of how “no” works.

It’s hard to fear someone you don’t respect. But it turns out it’s not impossible.

“I’m late for work,” I said.

While this was all going on, I had another housemate. His name was Justin, and he lived on the third floor. Joe didn’t take his stuff, but Justin also kept all his food in a mini-fridge in his room, only emerging now and then to boil the large pots of spaghetti he seemed to live on exclusively.

Justin was a biology student, who worked very hard and openly looked down on me for having majored in the humanities. He was not friendly and he had a huge chip on his shoulder and he did not seem to shower literally ever, but at this point, we were grading on a curve. Justin was my favorite person in the house.

One day, Joe’s ex-girlfriend showed up on our doorstep, because he owed her money and he wasn’t answering his phone.

“Come right in!” I told her.

Justin and I retreated to the kitchen as they fought, loudly, in the upstairs hallway.

“I hate this,” said Justin, “I hate conflict.”

“Me too,” I said.

We shared a beautiful moment of fellowship.

“To be honest, I think he kinda had it coming,” I added.

“Joe’s alright,” said Justin. “But by the way, did you know one time I saw him in your room when you weren’t there?”

Well, no, I had not known that.

“Back when he was smoking in the house,” Justin shrugged. “I walked by and he was in there, spraying it down with air freshener.”

“Huh,” I said.

“I don’t think it was anything,” said Justin. “But I thought it was kind of weird.”

“Huh,” I said.

I started keeping my door locked, whether I was in there or not. I started carrying around my computer when I left my room, so I could always be listening to a podcast, hoping it would make Joe talk to me less. I listened to a comedy podcast, but any time the jokes were sexual, Joe saw this as a window for a conversation. I switched podcasts.

If Joe still tried to talk to me, I kept my answers monosyllabic, no eye contact. Maybe if I was boring enough for long enough, he’d leave me alone. It was the closest I could come to playing dead without lying on the ground with my tongue hanging out, surrounded by flies, which would’ve been tricky to maintain.

I worked out at the YMCA at least four days a week, and didn’t think too hard about how nice it was to not need to shower at home.

At a cafe, I met two girls who were interested in forming a band. They liked one of the songs I’d written, but when they came over to jam, it turned out they were both freshmen in college. I couldn’t deal with this. I was uncomfortable enough about the age difference, but what if Joe happened to be around for the next jam session? The thought of subjecting teenage girls to him made me sick to my stomach and I never emailed them again.

Still, I tried to go out and do things. I joined meetup groups. I went to concerts. I made excruciating small talk with many, many strangers, but the longer it didn’t work, the lonelier I got, and the lonelier I got, the harder it was to engage with them, to approximate anything but a sucking vortex of emotional need. The harder it got, the thinner and more pathetic my attempts began to feel.

I would nod and smile and give boring answers to their questions and ask them boring questions in return and make jokes and hear their forced, polite laughter and try to make my face do normal face-things while all the while I was half-convinced they had to see that I was just an abandoned house, doors slamming and curtains blowing in the wind in a desperate attempt to pretend there were still people inside.

In retrospect, I think it’s possible I was depressed. This never occurred to me at the time, because from the inside of my head, it didn’t feel like depression. It just felt like I was very, very sad, that I would probably be very, very sad for the rest of my life, and that deep down I knew I probably deserved it.

Shortly after another argument about Joe’s laidback approach to rifling through my fridge and taking my stuff, I found a package of paper towels in the kitchen. On the plastic wrapper, he’d written with a sharpie:

“Joe’s paper towels ONLY. Do not use or I will END YOU. Haha just kidding, use as many as you want. :)”

Call me paranoid, but it felt like he was trying to tell me something.

Shortly after another argument about his laidback approach to absolutely trashing the kitchen, I came downstairs and found he’d smeared peanut butter all down a cabinet door, jelly pooling on the counter, slices of cheddar lying bare on the floor.

To be fair, it’s hard to know if that was a message or if he really was just that disgusting.

Every night, I cooked dinner — podcast on — loaded up a plate and a glass of wine, and ate it in my room with the door locked, video-chatting with some of my pre-existing friends. We were all in our mid-twenties, and all miserable in one way or another.

“Move out,” they said, but I’d signed a six-month lease.

We staged live reading of plays over Google hangouts — Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, The Importance of Being Ernest. We encouraged each other’s creative projects and listened to each other’s problems. It was like a support group, but with more drinking and less pants.

“I’m sick of being scared all the time,” I said.

“Break your lease,” they said. “You shouldn’t have to live like this.”

But when I ran it by the invisible audience inside my head, they were unimpressed.

“He wants me and Justin to give him money and in exchange he’ll cook for us,” I told them. “And when I said no, he pushed back for a long time. Is it that weird I want to make my own food?” Cooking was stress relief, one of the few things I felt like I had control of. I mean, my food would still occasionally vanish, but you know.

“You’re being irrational,” my invisible audience said. “You know you have an anxiety disorder. You’re rude and he’s trying to be nice to you.”

“He’s not being nice, he’s trying to control me,” I said. “And he doesn’t do this to Justin, but he thinks he’s entitled to tell me what to do, like just because I’m female, he has this claim over me — ”

“He can’t help it that you’re nuts,” they said. “Just like he can’t help it that you’re a — ”

“A bitch,” I said. “Yeah, yeah, I know.” At least they were reliable.

Joe continued trying to talk to me. “Don’t engage,” I’d tell myself over and over. One-word answers, no inflection. Don’t look him in the eye.

You know how it feels, as a woman, when you’re out in public and a stranger tries to talk to you, and something about them makes you nervous and you don’t know how to respond? You don’t want to be friendly enough to encourage them, but you don’t know them and you don’t know where their lines are, except they can’t tell or don’t care that you don’t want this interaction, and so you’re also afraid to make them angry.

You know how we tell ourselves that all we have to do is stay purely neutral, purely noncommittal, and we will find that sweet spot, that magic safety zone? You know how, all the while, we know in the back of our minds that this land is a fiction, that one man’s “Hey, she liked it” is another man’s “She was so stuck up she was asking for it?” Or even the same man’s, depending on his mood?

That’s where I lived. That was my kitchen and my living room and my laundry room and the hallway leading to my bedroom.

At home, I tried to be neutral and boring and removed, and out at Meetup events, I’d try to be interesting and present, but neither worked.

A year before all this, I would’ve told you that I was capable of sometimes being fun. That if you know me, I can be oddly charming, not despite my awkwardness, but almost because of it, because I can laugh at myself and because, knowing how painful it can be to feel unheard, I apply whatever social skills I do have into trying to put others at ease. That while I am emotional and sensitive and sometimes kind of a burden, I can also be damn funny and kind and generous, so at least for some people, it evens out.

In Minneapolis, nobody acted like I was funny or interesting. The person I saw the most was Joe, and I was deliberately harboring resentments, trying to keep myself angry at him, because it went against every instinct to cut myself off from another person like that, to keep saying no over and over, and I couldn’t maintain it without a lot of work.

We’d have a fight about him eating my cookies and I would get furious, and then feel petty and ridiculous for it, and then furious again at him for putting me in this situation, and crazy for blaming that on him and then and then and then —

“Jess, break your lease,” my parents said, “you deserve better.”

Lying alone on the floor of my room, with no human connections to show of my five months in the city, I wasn’t sure.

The turning point came when Manisha visited one weekend, and not just because her presence reminded me I was capable of connecting with other people and experiencing joy.

We were standing in the kitchen when he came in. Joe introduced himself. She introduced herself. They smiled and made eye contact and spoke with inflection. My heart sank. She was seemingly reacting to him like a normal person. I felt extra-crazy for my possum routine, furtive, weird.

At the end of the exchange, he asked her to repeat her name.

“It’s a hard name to remember,” he said, and then she laughed a polite social laugh and I think said something like,

“Well I don’t have trouble with it,” and then she said goodbye to him very politely and my heart continued to sink and then she grabbed my arm and dragged me to my room and shut the door and locked it and whispered,

“You need to move.”

“What?” I said.

“Jess, you need to move right now. You can’t live with this guy.”

“You’re just biassed because of the stuff I told you,” I argued.

“No,” she said. “I was expecting not to like him, but I thought he’d be a charming sociopath or something. He is so creepy. Oh my god, he walked in and my skin started crawling. Did you see how he looked us both up and down?”

I hadn’t, but then again, I hadn’t made eye contact with him in months. It was part of my completely ineffective avoidance strategy. Also, if I was honest, looking him in the eye had always made me uncomfortable and I’d never wanted to admit it to myself.

“Looked us up and down like he was sizing us up for a fight?” I said optimistically.

“Jess,” said Manisha.

“He’s creepy, right?” I said.

“He is extremely creepy,” she said. “And you have to move.”

I did not want to share a house with this guy but the thought of breaking the lease over nothing but misgivings made me nervous. The things that bothered me, they either seemed like the kind of minor roommate drama that sitcom characters complained about on TV, or they were hard to explain, and they didn’t stir up enough urgency with my inner invisible audience.

“You moved?” I imagined the polite Minneapolis strangers saying. “I thought you said you’d lived here already for a few months?”

“Yeah,” I’d say. “But my roommate ate my food sometimes and he kept trying to talk to me. Also, I think maybe he was gaslighting me?”

“Oh,” they’d say, and behind their polite masks I would see the bleak hunger for a subject change, their unspoken conviction about which roommate was the crazy one. Joe already seemed to think there was something wrong with me, I didn’t need to see any more of that.

Manisha brought it up again that night, over nachos at what she insisted on calling “The Great Mall of America.”

“He just gives me such a bad feeling,” she said. “And you said he gives you a bad feeling.”

“But to break my lease over it,” I protested.

“You keep saying it’s not bad enough to leave,” she said. “But you’re living with a person who makes you feel miserable and unsafe all the time — ”

“Is that enough, though,” I said. “I’m not, like, in any clear danger — ”

“Jess,” she said, “are you waiting for it to get dangerous?”

Manisha and I went to a bar and got back late. We were in my room, quietly talking, when there was a knock at the door.

“Do you girls need anything?” said Joe.

“No,” I said.

“Are you sure?” he said. It was two A.M.

“Yeah, Joe, I’m sure.”

“Okay,” he said, sulky. He went away.

A little while later, he knocked again.

“What,” I called through the door.

“Can I borrow a bandage? I dropped a knife on my toe.”

I grabbed my first-aid kit, cracked open the door, and pushed it through to him. I shut the door and locked it.

‘On his toe?’ Manisha mouthed. ‘Who drops a knife on his toe? How?’

I shrugged. It was Joe. We kept talking.

Manisha got up to use the bathroom, and when she came back, she said, “Hey! Let’s listen to music.”

“Okay.” I opened my computer and pulled up something on iTunes, and with the song as a smokescreen, she leaned in and whispered,

“YOUR BATHROOM IS COVERED IN BLOOD.”

“Oh my god,” I said. “I have to move.”

I have tried and failed to write this story many times, because the humanities major in me wants it to mean something. Where’s your thesis statement, Jess? What’s the thematic arc?

Is this a story about your feminism or your mental illness? Were you too hard on him, or did he systematically attack all your points of safety — your politics, your sense of compassion, your cooking, your perception of yourself as a kind person — and exploit your weaknesses? Is that giving him too much credit? In a world where most women have stories that are way worse by any definition, is there even a point in complaining?

Jesus Christ, girl, you majored in Creative Writing. Why, as you were once asked in a writing workshop, does this story even exist?

Is it enough to say that, in the four months we lived together, I worried endlessly that I was too emotional, too irrational, but never stopped to consider that his temper made far less sense than my fear? What threat was I? Why did he care if I didn’t want to hug him?

Is it enough to say, among the genuinely horrific tales of the worst case scenario, that a bad feeling can be sufficient, that you owe it to nobody to wait around until things get so dangerous that all your doubts are finally satisfied? What are you risking in the meantime, and for who, exactly?

My brain’s YouTube commenters were never convinced. They still wonder if it’s fair to get tetchy at someone for having the nerve to bleed while injured. They hear my vague suspicion that it was somehow on purpose, that he was playing it up to fuck with me, and they shake their heads and murmur, “Do you even know how crazy you sound?”

The thing about those internal voices is that you can get strong enough to ignore them, or you can get so tired you just stop caring.

I moved.

To be honest, it’s an anticlimax, a deus ex machina. I got a promotion that meant I could afford to live on my own. Within a month, I’d found an adorable one-bedroom apartment and yes, broken my lease. My parents and some sympathetic family friends helped me lug my stuff to the new place.

That first night on my own, I didn’t have the energy to cook, so I walked down the street to a Middle Eastern restaurant. I took a table by myself and tried to let it sink in that I honestly was never going to see this guy again, never going to try not to stare at the crotch-hole in his jeans or come home to find a new condiment blobbed onto the counter or lie awake in the middle of the night feeling the need to draw my boundaries tighter and tighter.

It turned out the restaurant had a small stage, and that one day a week a bellydancer came in and performed, and that today was the day. I watched a blond Minnesotan lady dance in a sparkly midriff-baring top. In one corner of my mind, it raised some questions about Orientalism and appropriation, but the owner, a middle-aged Middle Eastern woman, seemed content. There was a young family at the table next to mine, and a little girl — third or fourth grade, pageboy haircut, tomboy vibe — was utterly transfixed.

The dancer asked her to join her on stage and the two of them danced together — shyly, on the girl’s part, but smiling, happy.

My chicken shwarma blurred before me as I sat there, trying not to cry. It wasn’t just relief. It wasn’t just that I was still increasingly lonely, and jealous of any moment of human connection.

I’d forgotten that surprises could be good.