Snobby Shrek
Back in the Dark Ages, when Shrek was still Shawn and he hadn’t yet decided that we were twins, he came to stay with me for a few weeks.
He had, at the last minute, decided to transfer to Pitt and he needed a place to stay while he apartment hunted.
I offered up my place. “Come stay here,” I told him. “You can sleep on the couch.”
We were twenty-something-year-old college students and it felt like a thing brothers and sisters do. My roommate gave her blessing and “Shawn” arrived (it’s so weird not to call him Shrek, but that didn’t become his name until at least 2011).
Up our outdoor stairs he trundled, 17 bags hanging from each arm, then he dropped them in front of the door.
Confused, he looked around.
The furrow in his brow deepened as he peered up the indoor stairs.
We didn’t have the closeness we have now. I was a daily blackout drinker intent on having as much fun as possible and Shrek was a human who did things like pay bills. So he probably paused for a moment, contemplating how to say what he needed to say.
Then it came out: “Uh, there’s no couch here.”
He was right. The only furniture my roommate and I had, apart from our own beds, was a folding card table.
I nodded, accepting the veracity of his statement.
Then he continued: “You told me I could sleep on your couch while I look for an apartment.”
“Oh,” I shrugged. “I meant that more metaphorically than literally. You know, like when people say ‘come crash on my couch’ and it means ‘you can stay at my place.’”
He managed to furrow his brow even deeper. “That’s not a thing people say. When someone invites you to sleep on their couch, it means they have a couch you can sleep on.”
I didn’t see what the big deal was, so I gestured to the stairs. I’d “come to” on the indoor stairs the other morning, and it seemed cozy enough (for those of you who don’t know, daily blackout drinkers don’t “go to bed” or “wake up” – they “pass out” and “come to”).
Not yet ready to answer, “Shawn” went upstairs to use the bathroom. But it did NOT improve the situation.
“There’s no shower curtain in that bathroom,” he said when he came back down. “If I get a shower, the water is going to go all over the floor.”
I confirmed the truth of his statement. He was, once again, correct.
Eventually, he found a cozy-looking patch of floor and settled in for the night. He bought us a shower curtain the next day and moved to my aunt and uncle’s house shortly after. Longer commute, but things like a bed available. Shrek’s always been high falootin’ like that.
Before he left, I bid him adieu with a friendly wave, and an optimistic message: “Isn’t it so nice that I have a bathroom door in this apartment? And that you can turn off the lights without cockroaches scurrying across the floor?”
And he conceded the point, because neither of those things was true in my South Carolina apartment (which actually turned out to be a trailer, but I was too drunk to realize that until Shrek moved aside a tree and showed me the hitch.)
So anyway, just some morning musings, while I sit in Shrek’s fancy schmancy furnished house (he has beds, couches AND shower curtains!), laughing about the dramatic differences in my life over the last decade. What are my forties even going to be like?! Will I live in a castle? Be neighbors with JK Rowlings? Have the family compound in Asheville I yearn for?!
Wishing you a positive trajectory this and all decades,
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