Sweet Romance16 min read
The Invisible Roommate Who Cleaned My Life
ButterPicks11 views
I moved because I had to.
"One thousand two a month," the agent had said. "Shared apartment, split into two rooms. You get the kitchen and bathroom mostly to yourself. It's a steal."
"Is the master empty?" I asked.
"Locked up," he said. "The tenant travels a lot. You won't even see them. You'll have the whole place to yourself."
I signed. I needed cheap. I needed a roof. I needed to stop telling my mother I was okay when I wasn't. After the resignation, after the screenshots and the company silence, after the last bank transfer, the cheapest option in the neighborhood felt like a small miracle.
The first nights were awkward, nothing more. Then I noticed things.
"Why is there no hair in the sink?" I muttered once, standing in the bathroom in my pajamas.
The towel I left on the side vanished as if someone had folded it perfectly and put it away.
At first I thought I was losing track. Then the dog hair—my dog's hair—kept disappearing. The drizzle of fur we call a carpet in the living room was gone by morning, as if someone ran a broom every night.
"Maybe the helper comes at night," I told myself.
Then I saw the master bedroom door.
It was locked from the inside, the deadbolt set like it had been for months. But at night, as I lay pretending to sleep, the door would click. A soft creak, a whisper of fabric sliding, then nothing. I tried to ignore it.
"Leonor, this is ridiculous," I told my phone when I texted my friend. "It's a small apartment, not a haunted manor."
"Still, if someone is living there, why is everything so spotless?" my friend wrote back.
I decided to wake up one night and catch whatever lived in the other room.
I waited for the old clock to hit the ghost hour and then lay very still with my phone flashlight aimed at the master door. My heart thumped like an animal.
"Click."
The bolt turned.
"I swear I heard it," I breathed, voice barely a whisper.
There was a rustle, like cloth. Then a thin, precise tread across the floor, and a tiny, absurd sound—like someone humming an old country anthem off-key.
"Is someone there?" I said aloud, because silence crowded my ears.
No voice answered. But a faint, mechanical tapping filtered through the door—keyboard clicks. I supposed someone was inside working on something, alone, at that hour.
I stood, walked to the door and pressed my ear against the wood.
The tapping stopped.
"I thought I heard—" I started.
The door handle moved under my fingers.
It opened.
I shone the light in. The room was the dream of a certain kind of boy—tidy, precise, obsessed. A large desk with an ergonomic chair. A computer with multiple monitors. Sketchbooks stacked neatly. Action figures on shelves, all lined up by size and paint quality. Everything was immaculate. There was no dust. A Word document glowed on one screen; on the other, a half-inked comic panel.
"Hello?" I said, because it felt like the right word.
The keyboard jumped.
A single line typed itself out, one letter at a time:
"Y-o-u— are— the— g-h-o-s-t—?"
I made a high sound—I can't call it a scream. I ran. I ran into the hallway and out into the night while the neighbor looked at me like I'd gone mad.
I spent the night on the convenience store chairs until dawn, wrapped in a paper coffee cup and shame.
The next day, curiosity won over fear.
Back in the room, I opened the computer. If a ghost had been typing, there had to be a trace.
A .txt file sat on the desktop. Today's date at the top. The handwriting tone of someone who wrote with honesty and a kind of naive sadness. The name at the top was not a name I expected—there was no family name, only a first name typed cleanly at the top of the file: ELI.
"4/12
Lately, I've felt someone else in the room.
There are dog hairs I didn't leave, and long hairs in the sink. Every morning I pick them up. I can't stop picking. It is throwing my rhythm off.
Tonight I thought I heard a knock. The space between keys jumped. I felt something cross the floor. I asked:
'You— are— the— ghost—?'
She screamed."
I smiled without meaning to. Then I laughed. Then I sat there and read the whole file like it was a story meant for me.
He kept a diary in that lonely way people write when their apartment is their only witness. He talked about comics, about trying to upload a chapter and failing. He wrote about his favorite author and how lonely he was at night. He said he cleaned because he could not stand dirt. He said the hairs annoyed him because they broke his flow.
He was a cartoonist. He was a creature of routine. And he thought I was a ghost.
I was a little mad at myself for laughing, and a little embarrassed that I enjoyed knowing someone else had been alive in that room—even if he wasn't, not in the usual sense.
I left a comment on his Word file, mostly to scare him: DON'T TYPE SO LOUD. AT NIGHT. LEAVE SOME QUIET FOR OTHERS.
The keyboard jerked under my fingers, like someone had flinched. Letters formed.
"You— read— my— notes—?"
Then text, then conversation. It was ridiculous. It was a miracle.
"You are not a ghost," I typed back. "I am just needy and can't afford to move."
He typed a slow reply. "You have a dog?"
"Yes." I laughed. "She sheds like rain."
My dog—my companion—pushed her wet nose into the room's doorway like she could sense someone on the other side of the air.
"You have a dog?" the screen said. "I saw the dog."
"You actually did?" I asked, half teasing.
The keyboard typed, "Yes. She looked at the chair like she could see someone sitting there."
We started to talk every night. He never used voice. He didn't need to. The Word comments and the txt files became our letters.
"Where are you from?" he asked once.
"South. Came here for work and bad decisions," I typed.
"Do you draw?" he asked.
"I used to. Now I press 'apply' on thirty job postings a day and call my family at odd hours to sound normal."
"Send me a photo," he said.
I opened a file, selected a photo—one of those photos I had edited until my eyes were tired—and saved it to his desktop. When I opened his file the next night, there were drawings with me in them. Bright ridiculous gouache approximations of me in a camera-shot of the Forbidden City, of the Great Wall. He'd traced the photo into something tender.
"I had to make you where I have never taken anyone," he wrote. "These will be our postcards."
I stared at the images until the light went sweet and heavy. The loneliness in his black ink did something odd in me—an ache that was not exactly pity. Maybe we were both invisible in our own ways.
I began to return to the apartment nights before work just to watch him work. He typed like an old machine; he wrote like somebody beating the back of a drum to keep something alive. He complained about not being able to upload his comics. I learned his rhythms: daylight, sleep, ink, upload, despair. Sometimes his fingers twitched on the dormant keyboard without letters—they were like ghosts moving through snow.
"You actually think I'm dead?" he typed once.
"I didn't at first," I said aloud to the empty room. "But then I thought maybe you were a dramatic accident."
He typed, "Sometimes I leave this room and the city is empty and it becomes a maze. I get scared and run home."
"I drew one of our postcards. Wait till you see."
"Aren't you afraid?" he asked.
"Afraid of what?"
"Being left."
I plunged my face into my pillow and felt small and huge all at once.
We arranged rituals—stupid small things that made a life where touch did not exist. We watched movies at the same time. He annotated panels, adding speech bubbles to my preferred lines of dialogue. He critiqued the framing of scenes and the way I edited photos. I started drawing again under his tutelage. He taught me perspective and how to stop apologizing for the way I held a pencil.
"There are people who are cruel and those who are quiet," he typed one night. "You are quiet and stubborn."
"Is that a compliment?" I wrote.
"It is my honest review," he replied. "It will do."
We fell into the cadence of lovers who had never met. The city became our background music. His comic thumbnails filled the screens with a hand that cared. I let myself imagine skulls and graves less and the deep possibility of being seen more.
Then life, being life, interfered. I found a job, poorly paid but honest. They demanded eleven-hour days on some weeks and a patience I had not left in me. The keyboard grew quiet.
"I'm busy," I typed one evening, fingers tired.
"Did I make you want to leave?" he asked.
"No you made me want to survive."
He typed nothing for days. When he typed again, the letters were slow and jagged.
"You left without telling me," he wrote.
"I had to work," I said.
"I— I wrote something and deleted it," he said. "I tried to say I liked you."
"Did you type it?" I asked.
He showed the drafts. The words hung in the screen like a confession and then a retraction.
"I don't want to hold you to something that is walls and screens," I typed. "Go back to sleep, Eli."
He wrote, "If you leave, will you come back to the postcard walls?"
"I will come back," I lied.
A few weeks later, I sat in a humming city transit after a shift and nearly fell asleep on the seat. The world around me seemed like someone else's life. The dark car was filled with tired faces. The driver of a private car asked me where I was going. I said the address I had been giving—my address—and then dozed. When I woke, rain blurred the window. The driver drove on. My bag felt like a weight of regrets.
"Wake up," a voice said in my head and in my throat. I blinked and saw him—Eli—standing in the aisle of the car where no person should have been.
"Wake up," he said, but in my head the words came from the boy who used to type the slow letters.
He climbed to the front of the car like something out of a comic panel and banged on the windshield from the outside. The driver abandoned the seat and swapped to being small and apologetic. He called me liar and asked me to leave.
That night, after everything, I started to believe in miracles in small forms.
We had our stolen touch. In dreams, he was alive and reached for me. The world clarified in the way the first light clarifies ink on a new page. In dreams, we kissed like people reinventing a language. In waking, he cleaned my floors.
Then reality—it had teeth—bit into the warmth.
I went to the hospital to check into the truth about him. I had found a mention of him in a local art forum—someone had said an Eli Rivera in our district had been in an accident. I walked in like someone walking to someone's grave.
"Where is he?" I asked the counter.
"Room 814," the nurse said. Her voice was flat as linen.
I ran up stairs and around corners and found the room that smelled of antiseptic and sleeping hours.
"Are you—are you his—?" the nurse asked.
"I'm his friend," I said. "I am his—"
I froze because who was I to say girlfriend? Who did he let me be?
In the room, a man lay like a drawing: cheekbones sharp, hair clipped short for hate-of-hair days. The breathing machine fluttered like a small sea. His name tag read ELI RIVERA.
There was a woman there who called herself his mother—Francesca Berg—sterile in voice, efficient and sad in a way that left no warmth. A younger man in designer clothes—Gage Knudsen—stood to the side. He looked like he hadn't read a comic in his life. He looked like someone who paid lawyers.
"You don't belong here," Gage said to me when I reached the room's doorway. "This is private."
"He's my friend," I said, throat thick. "I'm with him."
Three nurses watched in the corridor like a Greek chorus. A doctor passed, eyebrows briefed.
I stayed. I kept reading his diaries on the computer in his room whenever I could. I signed forms and stood in hallways. I told the nurses he needed to come back—like an incantation.
The family treated him like a problem to be solved. "We want to move," said Francesca. "We're leaving the country. This is not our responsibility." Her voice had the practiced indifference of somebody who had rehearsed grief and found it a burden.
I felt rage like a stomach knot. "You are going to abandon him," I said.
"He's been in trouble for years," the mother answered, folding her hands. "It's not practical to keep him on machines."
The brother clicked his tongue. "We are moving. He is expensive. This will save us trouble."
The staff whispered and clucked and adjusted the curtains. The room held the soft glow of a television in another patient's room and the smell of boiled vegetables from a visitor's lunch.
I couldn't accept it.
That afternoon, I returned to him on the cheap mattress of my own life and pounded keys until my hands hurt. I wrote to him as if my letters could drag something back into him: "Don't leave me. Fight. Please."
He answered, "I don't know the path."
"Then I'm making it," I typed.
I spoke to everyone I could find—social workers, doctors, old professors he had mentioned. I slept in chairs and asked for prayer and wrote petitions. Nothing seemed to stick.
One week, then another, dwindled like a comic frame. The hospital said one thing: his brain function was failing. The brother and mother still packed boxes.
Then, one morning, there was a knock at the hospital room door unlike the ordinary ones. The welfare worker stood in the threshold with a cluster of people. A social media rumor had started—someone had posted about a "girl who kept a dead cartoonist alive with annotations," and the story had curled into the bloodstream of the internet.
The ward filled with people: interns, students, some of Eli's old classmates from the art school, some strangers who had read his small pages and loved them. The corridor hummed like a bee nest.
"Who is that?" Gage snapped.
"People who remember him," I said.
"What do you mean 'remember him'?" he barked.
"Look at this," I said, and I pushed play on my phone. On the screen were the postcards—the imagined photos he had drawn of us together. The images were bright and ridiculous and small and tender. As people gathered round, a low murmur spread.
"That's him, right? Eli Rivera?" one student said.
"Yes," someone else answered. "He taught me perspective."
A small voice in the crowd—an older man with paint stained fingers—said, "He saved me from giving up when I couldn't find my line."
I watched as the crowd's tone shifted from curiosity to ownership. They began to speak his name like prayer.
"Where's his family?" an intern asked. "Why are they packing boxes?"
Francesca's face went white. Gage tried to shepherd the conversation like a man chasing pigeons.
"He's an adult," Francesca said. "We can't—this is not our—"
"Not your son?" the painter demanded, and the question hung in the air, heavy as a gong.
It was then that the family looked small, like a house in which someone had turned off the lights.
"You hung up his work like laundry and let it dry in the air," a student said. "You kept him off the billboard. Where were you when he slept on his deadlines?"
The corridor filled with people now—nurses, patients watching from doors, tech kids with cameras. The social media thread had collected sympathy like a net. They began to chant softly, not mean but very clear: "Eli's work. Eli's life."
Gage's face flushed. "He was a problem to us," he said in a small voice now, because he could hear the truth and it was loud. "We had to do what's practical."
A woman from the art school stepped forward and laid a portfolio on the hospital table like an offering. "This is his comic," she said. "He wasn't a problem. He was a person."
I stood there, hands trembling, and I watched the public rearrange the scene. The family was shrinking inside their clothes.
"How dare you?" I said, but my voice did not have the edge I wanted. I wanted to melt glass.
Then Eli moved. His fingers twitched on the bed rail.
He opened his eyes and caught the light like someone who suddenly remembered where they were. They were small and bewildered and wet, and then they focused on me.
"Leonor?" he whispered.
"It is me," I said.
The room brightened an inch, as if the crowd had added more light to the world simply by wanting him alive.
He pulled himself up, not as the strong person he would become, but as someone who remembered his hand existed. He looked at his mother, at his brother, and every small lie they'd told themselves seemed suddenly inadequate.
"Mom," he said, voice thin. "Why did you—"
She opened her mouth and closed it. People around us watched as a woman confronted with the consequences of her choices turned pale and small.
And then something unexpected and terrible and true happened: a punishment not of fists, but of exposure.
Eli's waking happened in public. So did their failure. Nurses wiped their hands of their professional poise and watched with the rest of us. The corridor outside his room swelled with people who had known him online and peopled the hospital with a jury of strangers.
"Eli," the painter said quietly. "Your mother is leaving?"
"Yes," Francesca said. Her voice had a brittle edge. "We have responsibilities."
"Responsibilities to whom?" the painter asked. "To a bank statement? To an image? You abandoned a child who made people feel less alone. Are you proud?"
Heaped on top of Francesca's composed face, the crowd's judgments arrived like rain.
Gage tried to step forward. "This isn't—"
"Tell that to the fans," someone said, and a girl in a graphic tee projected a video of Eli's panels on her large phone. The images moved on the screen and his dialogue ballooned across the corridor like a banner.
"People come from across the city to see him," a student said. "He saved me when my work was folding."
A woman from the hospital administration walked in, attracted by the crowd. She frowned at the family. "This corridor is for visitors," she said first, but then she saw people clustered with portfolios and phones and felt the shift in air: the public had taken possession of this corner of the hospital.
Francesca's voice shrank. "We thought—" she began, and then a chorus of voices rose to fill the sentence.
"You 'thought'?" the painter echoed. "You thought a son could be shelved and you would scribble 'responsible life' in his place? You didn't fight for him. You closed the doors."
The crowd did not shout. They did not need to. They stood like witnesses. Their posture was accusation. Francesca's cheeks flooded with color, and she bowed like an actor taking the consequences of a bad scene.
Gage, who had been so polished, now had the varnish scraped off him by the simple collective attention. "We didn't know," he said, but no one believed him.
"Of course you didn't know," said one of Eli's classmates. "You didn't go to the shows. You didn't read the drafts. You never sat up with him like we did. You didn't carry the midnight prints to the copy shop."
The hospital charges filed a complaint because there were too many people. But the complaint wasn't about noise; it was about the way the truth had stepped into the corridor and wouldn't go away. People took photos. Someone streamed it. Not to shame—well, sometimes to shame—but mostly to archive: the moment the family had to face the audience Eli had built with his art.
Eli sat up more, and his eyes landed on Gage. "You packed my stuff," he said.
"I did," Gage said. "It had to be done. It was becoming a liability."
A murmur moved through the crowd. One of the nurses—young, fierce—slid between them and looked Gage in the eye.
"A liability?" she said. "He is a person. You packed his things like you packed away a broken appliance. Did you try to keep his drawings? Did you ask anyone? Or did you just put it in boxes and think, 'Good, problem solved'?"
Gage's mouth worked. He looked like a puppet with its strings cut.
The painter stepped forward and took a piece of Eli's comic from the portfolio. He held it high like a flag. "This is his life," he said. "This is not baggage."
A student started clapping, a soft single clap that multiplied. Then another student, and then a nurse, and then a neighbor. Applause rolled like a small tide.
Francesca's face crumbled. She turned away because she couldn't withstand the way the world had decided she'd been wrong.
Eli watched her go in a way that made me forget everything else—he didn't seem vengeful. He looked only tired, like someone who had been permitted to return to his life and had discovered the people he'd expected to be anchors were ships passing without horns.
He breathed and then tapped my hand because my fingers were cold.
"You did this," he said, voice so light it felt like a joke. "You made them feel like someone noticed."
I had no answer. I had only the thud of my chest and the warm, absurd miracle of him.
There, in the hospital corridor, this modern courtroom of phones and strangers, the family unraveled. Francesca's professional mask shattered. Gage had to answer to people who had loved the son he discounted. The agent who had rented us the place—David Graves—arrived later, called because someone online had dug up the contract. His face registered bad timing and greed in equal measures.
"Did you know the previous tenant had issues?" someone asked.
David tried to sound innocent. "No. I—"
"Is it standard to rent out a room of a living person?" another voice asked.
"You took five thousand deposit and then admitted you wouldn't return it because the contract said so?" an intern said.
David's smile thinned. He shuffled his papers. People filmed him. A security guard told him to wait for the complaints desk. People murmured about how the market eats people and calls it business. The crowd had the kind of justice that is not listed in bylaws but feels righter than many laws.
This was the punishment: exposure. Not jail, but the slow public unmasking. Francesca learned that love sometimes costs more than convenience. Gage learned that aesthetics are not excuses. David learned that a contract cannot be the answer to a human failing when a city has people who care.
But I wanted something more private and sharp. I wanted them to feel—the sting.
Eli, still fragile, raised his voice in a way that made everyone hush.
"You know what hurts?" he said. "It's not the being in a machine. It's the forgetting. You were more afraid of what people would think than of losing me."
"That's not fair," Francesca said. She tried to stand,. but the weight of hundreds of eyes kept her small.
Eli coughed. "I don't want apologies that cost nothing."
A man from the art school placed a stack of Eli's comics on the bed. "We will publish these," he said. "We will show people what you didn't see."
Francesca sank into a chair and covered her face. Gage's suit looked cheap under the scrutiny. David was led to a formal complaint. He was asked to return deposits and to attend mediation in front of tenants rights groups who had by then materialized online.
The punishment scene rolled on and on, but it did not end in cruelty. It ended in reckoning. They were not humiliated for gossip's sake. They were made present. The hospital corridor did what the courtroom often cannot: it allowed a community to say, "This is not how it will be."
People took photos of Eli. They brought him books. They promised to carry his work. It wasn't a vengeance scene; it was correction. And yet, in its soft brutality, it was the kind of punishment that changes the shape of a life.
Eli looked at me then, eyes bright as a comic panel. He squeezed my hand.
"They clap for me," he said.
"You earned them," I said.
He smiled. It was small. It was the kind of smile that used to belong only to his drawings—an easy, rare thing. His finger lifted and brushed my cheek like a draft of warmth. It was the first real touch after months of fingers and letters.
"You held me together," he said, breathing hard but steady. "You built me a noise that made everyone else listen."
We both began to laugh then—a wet, stubborn sound that filled every corner of my chest.
Later, when the day thinned and the crowd drifted into the city's other obligations, I sat by his bed and read his diary pages aloud. He listened with a soft attention that made me feel like an important narrator.
"Do you remember the postcards?" he asked. "I want to take the photos for real."
"Then let's do it," I said, and I thought of cities, of silly photos, of a life that would finally be ours to mess up properly.
We left the hospital slowly in the weeks after. He learned to walk with faulty legs and a stubborn will. He learned to come to my cheap apartment and complain like a live person about the small things. He learned to laugh at the dog tearing up a cushion. He learned, finally, that being seen mattered more than the neatness of a life.
And me—I learned to draw without apology. I learned that to love someone is sometimes to carry their art like a living thing. I learned that the invisible work—cleaning hair, leaving notes—counts like prayer.
The world gave us a punishment scene and a kindness scene, both carried in a single corridor. We took both.
Months later, when tourists pointed their phones at the same silly monuments Eli had once drawn into existence, we stood side by side, messy and sunburnt and terrible at framing but laughing, just like the panels had promised.
On a bench at a crowded tourist spot, he turned to me and said in that slow way only someone who had almost stopped wanting could say,
"You're the one who cleaned me up."
"I always wanted clean floors," I replied, smiling.
He took off his jacket—something he'd never do for anyone else before—and draped it over my shoulders.
"Because you are cold," he said.
That small, ridiculous thing made my heart skip. It was the moment when a man who had once been a ghost decided he would take a coat off for me in public.
It was the sound of ordinary care, the kind that makes a life.
The End
— Thank you for reading —