Q&A: Unclean

The fifteenth question for the Q&A section of this blog is: “Where is the dirtiest place you’ve ever been?”

I feel like there are probably a few answers I could give to this question, but honestly I’m not keen on thinking about those experiences for very long, so I don’t want to spend a lot of time trying to quantify which is worse than the others.  So, because it’s the easiest to call to mind, I’ll talk about the most recent incredibly dirty place I’ve been, that certainly would be a contender for dirtiest ever, if not the winner…and that is the house my last boyfriend temporarily rented a room in from his friend’s brother.

This would have been preferable.

Now, it wasn’t my boyfriend that made the mess, though he didn’t clean it up, either.  I can’t really blame him for not wanting to touch that filth, especially considering he didn’t make any of it, but still, the fact that neither of the boys cleaned up any of the mess this guy made meant that this place was a sty that got worse each time I experienced it.

The first time wasn’t horribly bad, there were just a lot of dirty dishes around the kitchen and giant piles of dust balls throughout the rooms and down the hallways, but the next time I came back – more than a month later – those same dirty dishes were still on the kitchen counters, because apparently this guy had taken to eating from paper plates so he wouldn’t have to wash the dishes anymore.  Those paper plates, of course, were coated with old food and overflowing the garbage bin.  My boyfriend’s plates were in a neat stack in a corner of his room, because he said he washed each plate every time he used it because he didn’t want to leave any to join the horribly disgusting pile.  Valid.

The dust balls had, by this time, grown to immense proportions, and there was hair, salt (it was winter) and outside dirt everywhere, and the bathroom looked as though it had not been cleaned in years.  I could smell it at the bottom of the stairs, when it was up the stairs and down the hall.  The only clean room in the place was my boyfriend’s, and it was full of unopened moving boxes, yet looked pristine by comparison.

The third time I was there, I was informed that my boyfriend had accidentally ingested coffee cream that had chunks in it, because he had mistakenly grabbed the roommate’s creamer instead, and that he’d attempted to microwave some food, but couldn’t eat it because the food took on the stench of the uncleaned microwave.  That, combined with the fact that the kitchen was still overflowing with dirty dishes and garbage, there was now garbage littering the floor along with the dust balls, and there were splatters of alcohol and what I can only assume was vomit on the walls from a party the roommate had had a month previous (that my boyfriend was not present for; the roommate talked to me on that occasion and didn’t seem to see at all why the splatters on the wall were anything but a hilarious indicator of a good night), that he had not even tried to clean…well, that all led me to decide that my boyfriend simply couldn’t live there that way anymore, and would have to move in with me.

I forgot to mention that the house was overrun with fruit flies, as well, though I guess you could probably imagine that that would be the case given the filth they were living in.  I shudder to think what else would have been living in there with them, that they couldn’t see through the dirt.  But in a little more than a month, my boyfriend moved out, so the last time I was at the house was to help him move.  The roommate had cleaned the place up, finally, to lure in a new tenant, but even at its cleanest, the house was still disgusting.  It’s a shame, too; it could have been such a nice  house if that guy had never lived in it.

I think that’s about all there is to say about that.  I sincerely hope I never experience anything like that again, and I’m not even going to allow myself to think of the other dirty places I’ve been now that I’ve had to remember that.

Check out Mike’s answer at http://emptystress.wordpress.com, and please feel free to post your own in the comments! 

(Next question: “When do you love yourself most?”)