This morning was very surreal. I woke up after 8 am in the morning to a ringing of my doorbell and a pounding of the front door. I stumbled out of my bed, opened up the bedroom door, and yelled a “hold on!” When I stepped out into the living room, I was greeted with a very strong gas smell coming from the living room. As I had just woken up, the realization that there was a gas leak did not hit me until I opened up the front door and the security man from downstairs rushed inside and into the kitchen, quickly inspected the gas stove, pointed at one of the dials and said, “The stove is still turned on.” Indeed it was. “My roommate must have left it on when she was cooking dinner with her boyfriend last night,” I explained to him, the gravity of the situation quickly sinking into me now that I was fully awake. He turned off my stove and told me that I should check on my roommate to make sure that she was okay because she had not stirred from her bedroom since the commotion first started. I knocked on her door before opening it up. It turned out she was fine and just a heavy sleeper. When I saw that she was okay, I felt like yelling at her at that moment for putting our lives in danger, but because I had just moved into the apartment (and she did make dinner for me as well last night), I bit my tongue and proceeded to tell her what had happened. I did manage to insert a “we could have died” somewhere (I don’t think I was being melodramatic in saying that) in this conversation, but even that statement did not seem to phase her. Hmm…perhaps the gas leak had affected her brain already? I don’t know. I was expecting an apology from her, but I wasn’t getting one apparently. So I went back to my bedroom, shut my door, and opened all of the windows. Since all hopes of returning back to a blissful sleep had been dashed, I decided to get out and roam the neighborhood for a few hours. Plus, I thought it’d be wise to wait for the apartment to air out before returning to it.

My roommate did end up calling me and leaving a message on my cell phone after I had left the apartment. She didn’t know where I had dashed off to in such a hurry in the morning, and wanted to make sure that I was okay. At the end of her message, she apologized to me.

What a morning. I’m still shaking a bit. Here’s hoping to a less eventful weekend.