CREEPY CATALOG

I Found My Roommate Off Craigslist And He Turned My Life Into Nightmare

I hate when people ask me what it's like to be blind.

It seems like people are absolutely incapable of imagining a world without sight. They ask me if everything is just black all the time. But I've been blind since birth – I don't know what "black" is. They ask me how I can possibly make it through the day, when so much of the world depends on vision. No, your world depends on vision.

What they don't understand is that I can do just fine for myself, that being blind has just given me the opportunity to cultivate my other senses to near perfection. So much of my day depends on texture – the smoothness of my kitchen counter and the smoothness of my coffee table are two entirely different kinds of smooth. The glide of a person's skin can tell me what kind of job they have, what kind of life they live. There are so many secrets in the grain of things that most people ignore.

What I don't get from texture, I get from sound. My ears are able to pick up the minute shuffles and scrapes of life from hundreds of yards away. It is easy to make my way down the street, when my course is mapped out by the living space around me. I don't need to see the car in the crosswalk to know that it's there. I don't need to see the businessman staring at his phone to avoid him.

Trying to explain this to people is a pain because they don't listen. Have you ever noticed how poorly people listen, in their worlds dominated by sight? They're always shutting off their ears, believing that nothing can be gained by listening. If only people would open their other senses, maybe this world wouldn't be so confused, so misguided.

Yes, being blind comes with its difficulties. But never once have I felt wronged by living without sight.

A couple of months ago, I decided to find a roommate.  

Up until this point, I'd been pulling enough cash to rent an apartment all to myself. I work as an educational consultant, which essentially means that I help students apply to college. I work with "unconventional" students, like myself – mostly, students who are deaf, blind, or mute. Because I can relate to them, I work the best with them.

However, about half a year ago I tripped and fell down my apartment building stairs, resulting in a broken arm, a bad concussion, and a few weeks off of work. Finding myself short on cash, I decided that it was time to get a roommate. That way, if something like this happened in the future, I wouldn't have to worry about not making rent. Besides, it would be nice to have a little extra cash.

I posted an ad on Craigslist – yeah, yeah, I know, Craigslist – using a dictation tool to specify what I was looking for. Someone who was relatively neat and quiet, didn't mind cats (I have a little black cat named Spooky), and didn't mind living on the seventh floor.

I had a few responses. Most of them were a bunch of perverts asking for naked pictures. One or two of them were interested in the apartment, but ended up looking elsewhere. For a while, I thought that I was shit out of luck.

Then, one afternoon as I stood in my kitchen making cupcakes (not easy to do with a broken arm, by the way), I received a knock on my door.

The first thing I noticed when I opened the door was that the person standing there had a deep voice. I can tell with a fair amount of precision what a person sounds like by listening to them breathe. This person's breaths were long and deep, and I could very well imagine the smooth baritone that would accompany it.

"Can I help you?" I asked, wondering what they wanted.

The person reached out and grasped my hand. I was a little bit startled and wary, until they began to sign against my palm.

When I was in high school, I had taken American Sign Language to better communicate with some of my friends. Some of them were deaf and had problems speaking, some of them were mute, and so sign language was a good way to communicate with them. I kept studying it in college since I knew I wanted to work with other "disabled" students (I hate the term "disabled," but I also hate the term "differently abled," so, hey, what can you do?). As such, I was fairly fluent.