For a writing assignment in class, I had to write two letters – one about one of the worst moments in my life and one about one of the best moments in my life. This letter is about Marilena – one of the most beautiful people I have ever met.
I have to tell you about my roommate, Marilena. Do you remember how freaked out I was about even having a roommate since I’ve always had my own room? Well, I remember you telling me not to worry – you were right. I got her contact information in the mail a few weeks before school started. When I went to look her up on Facebook, I realized she did not have one. That freaked me out a little bit because I did not want to have to call or email her – they both seem like creepy ways to contact someone for the first time. I was left with no choice, so I emailed her. It reminded me of the movie Cruel Intentions because of this scene Ryan Phillipe’s character. He was trying to convince someone two write a letter because that is more poetic “Email is for two groups of people – geeks and pedophiles”. We both know that I am not a pedophile, but I do have some geeky tendencies. I am obsessed with everything being organized, specifically by color in regards to notes for class or my closet, or chronologically when it comes to the way I tell a story or write down things in my planner for the day. Marilena and I even emailed each other pictures of ourselves so we would be able to recognize each other on move in. Anyway, she responded and we had this back and forth correspondence over the course of a week or two. Finally, I grew a pair and decided to call her. The school only gave me her home phone number, which made it that more awkward – it meant that I would have to talk to whoever answered the phone at her house, not just her directly.
I think I was almost relieved when no one answered the phone. But then the beep letting me know I could leave a message came so fast. I remember telling myself that her parents would probably be the ones to listen so I should make sure I am semi-formal. “Hi Morales Family, My name is Kristin Tappan – I am calling for Marilena, I will be her roommate next year at Santa Clara University. I was just calling to say hello and go over some last minute details. I am excited to hear back from you Marilena. I hope all of you have a great day.” I was so anxious waiting for her to call back. When she did call back the next day, I was expecting there to be a ton of awkward silences and strange banter. I could not have been less accurate. We talked for a full hour and a half with no awkward silences whatsoever. Imagine having a conversation on a warm spring day in a park with your best friend – that is what our first conversation was like, easy and enjoyable. She even admitted that because she didn’t have a Facebook, she used her best friend’s account to search for me. We had a good laugh about that one, especially when I told her how creepy I felt sending her an email. It was as if we had known each other for years.
The true test was move-in day (and those first few weeks of school and adjusting, of course). I had already accepted that my mom would cry on move-in day, my mom is extremely emotional and we are very attached to one another so it was inevitable. My brother caught me a little off guard when he began to cry because I just hadn’t thought about him being super sad about me leaving, so that was moving, but not enough to move me to tears. It was when I heard sniffling behind me that I realized that someone else was crying – my godsister, Crystal.
Because she is my rock during hard times, it is not often that I see her cry. But then I realized that this must be really hard for her – we have never lived further than 15 minutes away from one another. Currently, we can get to each other’s houses in seven minutes with traffic and three minutes if it is late at night and we get all green lights. So when I saw that she was crying and I went over to embrace her, I lost it – literally. I was crying uncontrollably and there was nothing anyone could say to make it stop or to make me feel better. Crying is an extremely draining experience for me; I usually want to collapse somewhere afterwards because the weight of my body is too much for me to hold. For every minute that I spend crying, I usually like to take an hour long nap i.e. crying for five minutes requires a five hour nap. When I watched the car pull off, it suddenly dawned on me that I probably looked like a train wreck, especially because I was wearing makeup and crying + makeup=raccoon eyes. Not exactly the first impression I wanted Marilena and her family to have of me – the overemotional roommate.
It was even stranger because I am not typically someone that cries so I act awkward when I do. There are people that have been in my life for at least a decade that have never seen me shed a tear, and now here I was with Marilena, someone that I had just met in person for the first time today, visibly upset, eyes puffy and nose stuffy. You know how I am about opening up to people – I am like an onion, you have to peel back layer after layer to truly get to know me fully and reach my core. I can put on a game face for the general public so I am friendly, but people usually do not know me as well as they think they do. Fortunately with Marilena, it was so different. She did not make me feel crazy for reacting the way that I did when my godsister and best friend of the last seventeen years drove off to go home which was 350 miles away.
We were living together for less than a week and she knew things about me that some people that I hung out with daily in high school did not know – and would probably never know. I feel like she is my soulmate as far as friends are concerned – she understands me fully and loves me unconditionally. We can sit around for hours doing absolutely nothing and have the best time. Something that I loved about her is that she did not have unreasonable expectations about how a good roommate and friend should be, so we took one another by surprise when we ended up being one of the best people the other one had ever met. It is crazy because I cannot picture my life without her in it. Marilena helped me get through some of the roughest points in my life and because I was in this new and unfamiliar place, she was the person that I was closest to at Santa Clara University so she watched me go through every single part of it.
She fits so well into my inner circle, like the very last missing piece to puzzle. And to think, I just thought I was going to room with someone, not gain a best friend. I am in my senior year at SCU, and even though she goes to University of Washington in Seattle now, we still talk every single day. She ended up transferring after our freshman year because her dad got extremely sick during our spring quarter and had to have open heart surgery. Marilena, being a very family oriented person, did not feel comfortable being that far away from home, just in case anything went wrong. It was hard for me to think of Santa Clara University without her because I had experienced everything with her. The worst part was that she did not make the decision until August when her dad still had not fully recovered from his surgery in spring and when her roommate for the upcoming year bailed out on her at the last minute (we would have lived together if I had not got the Community Facilitator job for the upcoming year – I sometimes wondered if I wouldn’t have taken that job if Marilena would still be here because she would know that she had a constant in her life, me).
Nonetheless, I feel like I gained a new family member – our bond is what I would imagine sisters to be like. I am so lucky to have been randomly placed with her during the summer of 2007. My life is exponentially better with her in it.
