I don’t know what I was expecting when I first stepped into my new to-be home - or at least for the rest of the year. Maybe I’d wanted my roommate to already have been there, waiting for me at the door steps with a smile and a warm hug. Perhaps he was talkative, wanting to chat and leaving me no real time to undo my things. He and I’d get so caught up in conversation that we’d completely forget lunch and dinner - not something I did on a usual basis.

Well, the warm welcome, it wasn’t what I got.

What I got instead was an empty apartment and lots of time to unpack. Plus no distractions to keep me away.

My first day alone had been spent unpacking and throwing everything into the proper shelves prior provided by the owners of the building. Mind you, not exactly in the best of order, but that really wasn’t the manly way to go about life anyways.

(But just because there wasn’t a whole lot of things to do in an empty apartment alone, I ended up going back and readjusting everything anyways. I even sent my mom an evidence picture through text messages, like I’d promised. Though, she never did reply.)

And after unpacking, I let myself take a tour of the place - because, after all, this was my place now.

The living room wasn’t too huge and there punched an empty slot where there was supposed to be a television, but the more than comfortable looking couches made up for the lack of. There were also shelves of color sorted books - English, I noted after closer observation - I was almost positive was put out just purely as decor. No one in their right minds would have read that anyways.

Despite the building being owned by an elderly couple, it looked fashionable and, dare I say it, hip.

The kitchen, obviously, was the best addition to the apartment. The fridge was huge - bigger than the one my aunt had -, a pink sticky note on the right door noting that we’d need to do some grocery shopping (and that there was two ice-cream cones we could help ourselves to) to fill the appliance after our arrival. Digging through the cupboards, it was easy to tell that the owners had been very concerned about there being a replica of every utensil known alive to mankind. My guess was, they’d worked somewhere in the culinary field before settling down to lending out apartments for poor college students who forgot the dormitory registration deadline. And though I’d probably never use even half of them - I liked eating food but couldn’t exactly brag for making them - it had me smiling. The thought was well appreciated.

I’d never met the people who owned the building - my roommate and uncle had apparently already sorted out everything before I’d arrived - but I seriously owed them a big hug. They were officially awesome.

The last place I checked was the other bedroom, Jongup’s.

Though I knew no one was there - no shoes, no person (unless Jongup walked around barefoot, not that I was judging anything) - I knocked anyways, poking my head in after the third knock and no reply. “Hello?”

Like my room, I’d thought his would be empty as well. Bare walls and empty shelves for when the owner came to fill them in. I was wrong though. Of course. Jongup must have come before me and left. Maybe he’d gone out to grab some dinner.

Judging it to be safe - we were going to get to know each other pretty well soon enough anyways - I pulled into the room, tip toeing through without real reason why. He had a lot of books; by a lot I mean a lot. He might as well as have opened up a private library with the amount of books he had crawling around the room, some in lazy tumbles at his desk and others stacked up against the walls in fixed lines. Something told me that Jongup was a bookworm.

(Unless he was the sort to collect books, but never read them. Like my mom.)

His clothes had also been folded up and hung neatly where they belonged. Everything in his room seemed to have its place and being - everything except me anyways.

Something told me that Jongup was a neat freak, or at least, that’s what his room spoke of him; and the knowledge sent an uncomfortable feeling down my stomach. Leave it to god to give me a ocd as my roommate. (Note to self: go clean room again.)

Before he could catch me on the act of snooping around - if he was as much a nerd as I pictured him to be, I certainly wouldn’t have had a problem fending him off -, I turned hot on my heels to leave. That would probably be the last time I stepped into that room.

The rest of the day was spent poking through the house and the fresh delivery flyers I’d found tapped to our apartment door. I’d even nosed through one of the English books in the living room - though that didn’t last very long. It was, over all, an uneventful day.

At a point, I may or may not have started talking to the pages of the cooking magazine laying around the kitchen table.

Later, dinner came in the forms of my stomach growling angrily at me. I didn’t protest to its demand and grabbed my keys and wallet to dash out. The empty silence was starting to make me a bit delirious in the head. It was time to take a visit to the outside world and find myself a good burger joint to fill my unending appetite and hopefully not get lost on my way back.

But luck didn’t seem quite on my side today.

(On the bright side, dinner had been amazing.)