Posters, Personalites, And Missing Roomies

My roommate moved out this week. He had only been at Trinity for two days out of the last two weeks, so I should have seen it coming, but I didn't. I thought that maybe he was just lying in a gutter somewhere with is throat cut, not that he was deciding to take a year off and maybe come back in the fall. I came home from the mall and he was packing up.

Now this was unpleasant to me for many reasons. The first and foremost is that I liked him. We got along well. He was a great guy. We liked the same music, kept roughly the same hours. We worked together. All of us on the floor are going to miss him a lot.

Second, he brought the TV. Now, on top of dealing with suddenly not having one of the few people I actually felt like I knew here, I am also dealing with the withdrawal symptoms of a sever Bond habit.

Thirdly, he took his posters down.

That may sound like a trivial point to the non-college student, but it is actually rather major. We have a room with a lot of wallspace, meaning gigantic expanses of white. I did what I could with a world map and a giant "Swingers" poster, but even with the addition of two smaller posters, I come nowhere near filling the space.

Max had great posters. And a lot of them. When he was here, the walls looked pleasantly full, as though two people who were cool lived in this room, instead of one person trying to be cool.

With his posters, our room had personality, a nice mix of new and old. My Marvel Comics poster next to his Jack Kerouac poster. My Pablo Picasso and his Rat Pack. It was a perfect mesh of personalities that was visibly conveyed to anyone who entered the room.

I came home one day at the beginning of the year and he said that he had bought a poster at the poster sale in Mather (God bless those sales). When he unrolled it I nearly wet myself. It was a picture of the Hindenburg blimp, going up in flames, crashing into a tower of some sort (I acknowledge that this alone is not funny in the least). However, above the black and white picture is, in giant white letters, spelled out what must surely be the thought of the captain of the airship: "SHIT!"

That poster, regardless of what you may think about it, had personality. Everyone who walked in just had to comment on it. If it every fell down, we didn't have to search through our extensive vocabularies to come up with some exclamatory sentence. It was a conversation starter, a companion in times of duress, it was our room.

But now its my room, and my posters, and a whole hell of a lot of white space. I had gotten used to the room being empty during my roommie's extensive MIA period, but now the walls are even deserting on me.

The personality if gone.