My Roommate Paul
By Karsol
Paul was a weird roommate.
It started when he first arrived at the dorm room I resided in at the time. He was quite tall, with dark copper hair and a blinding grin that never seemed to go away. He didn’t bring many things with him when he first came over, but he brought a confusing number of instruments with him — and an inordinate amount of guitars.
Everyday, he would play something on his guitar at six in the morning and swoon the landlady in charge. It was very soothing when I went to have my first coffee cup of the day, and it sure beat my alarm in waking me up anyway, so I didn’t mind it that much. I always saw him leave with only a tote bag and a gold-colored sling bag, and there would always be an entourage of boys and girls with him whenever I passed by him. Every night, he would have some new person come to our dorm room and leave a pile of beautifully fragrant flowers the morning after.
One time, when I came back to the room after a date with my boyfriend, he looked at the bouquet of flowers I held in my hands and bawled in front of me. I was a bit confused as to why he cried. He looked up at me with the shiniest of tears and asked me, “Is that what I think it is?”
I was a bit worried about him and so I sat down in front of him. I told him about my date with my boyfriend and how he gave me Hyacinth flowers. I didn’t expect much but Paul, towering figure as he is, knelt down and cried even harder. He kept calling out, “Hyacinthus! Hyacinthus…” while crawling over to his bed and strumming his heart out on his guitar for three hours straight. After that, he brought me over to a night of incessant drinking at the nearby bar.
I kinda miss him now. He left as suddenly as he came and gave me all his instruments saying that he has “a new song to sire someplace else”.
A few days after that, the police came over and interrogated me as an accessory and eyewitness to a series of disappearances from the University, but it blew by just as much as it came.
But I sure do miss his serenades.
