( CW ) ( LAST SENTENCE ) And then he proceeded to lock the door , hoping that no one would ever open it again .

There were three more months left before he could emerge from this living hell. He thought of marking the days that had passed by chiseling ticks on the wall just like prisoners did in movies, but he would get fined for that at the end, so he decided against it. There was no sense in wasting even more money here, after everything he'd been through. 
 
 Before he came here they had promised him that it would be an experience of a lifetime. They'd beguilingly assured him that there would be a vibrant community of like-minded peers, that he could come out of his shell and into the light. It would be fantastic, they averred. 
 
 Lies, lies, all of them. Calumnies of epic proportions that his callow self had latched onto with naive alacrity. 
 
 Now his head was filled with maudlin thoughts; he constantly berated himself for failing to perceive this predicament and retreated into an anodyne solitude, though that was difficult for obvious reasons. His existence within these 113 square feet had descended into anomie; the rules of civilization had been replaced by arrant anarchy. Was any of it his fault? 
 
 Maybe, maybe not, but he did deeply regret subjecting himself to the aleatory whims of a roommate lottery. If only he had the foresight to realize that whoever he'd end up with could be such an albatross. If only, if only, if only. 
 
 But at least there were his books. His printed-paper analeptics, his only real companions. He could bury his head in them and escape; he could journey to the arcadian fields of Patagonia with Borges or immerse himself in compendious descriptions of Tamerlane's conquests. Tonight, he had chosen to visit Faulkner in Yoknapatawpha County. Or at least that was the plan. 
 
 The faint shuffling of paired, coltish footsteps began to nag at the edge of his aural detection zone. A key stuck into the lock. Turn. The door swinging open. Aimless claptrap emanating from two mouths, the faint smell of cheap American liquor flavoring each word. His roommate had returned. 
 
 He looked askance at his roommate and the female he had brought back; she was bedizened with indescribably gaudy clothing that probably sprung from the dank corners of a Goodwill Bargain Bin, although her wardrobe decisions seemed to have been made out of socially-influenced desire rather than income-driven necessity. There was no sense in thinking too much into this though; those clothes were more like obstacles to his roommate's objectives, after all. 
 
 Collapsing onto each other on top of a bed - his bed, to be precise - his roommate and the dowdily attired girl began what was probably their first bout of exercise for the day, given their ponderously labored breaths and the fact that both had the girth of hippopotami. He shuddered at the evolutionary implications of this should certain events occur. The quality of the world's gene pool would not benefit. 
 
 He'd become inured to this though; every so often his bed - it was always his - would become the site of a constrained tango of two large gravitational masses, a Jupiter swirling of alcohol and vomit consorting with a Saturn or perhaps, for the benefit of his bed's structural supports, a Uranus or Neptune. Questioning his roommate's preferences was a bootless endeavor. He'd ran the gauntlet of all these unfortunate instances and come out alive, and that was all that mattered. His roommate's solipsistic inconsiderateness and alcohol-enhanced choleric outbursts, those all seemed like minor peccadilloes at this point. 
 
 Ah, they had finished burning their calories at last; they sure as hell needed it. They shifted around, the rustling of clothes could be heard, they mumbled incoherently. The two then stumbled off the bed, half-dressed, pushed the door open with their collective weights, and half-collapsed into a walk down through the hallway outside. A few footsteps later, the door slid shut by itself. 
 
 At last, solitude. There would be damage to assess, but for now, he was safe again. The glint of abandoned keys caught his eye. His roommate might be back soon, but he would n't be coming inside. 
 
 Solace. Solitude. Safety. 
 
 He smiled. He got up, promising the book on his desk that he would be right back. And then he proceeded to lock the door, hoping that no one would ever open it again.
