In our bathroom there is a tissue tower on the platform behind the toilet - it is either the fourth or the fifth tissue towel built on that very location. It all started from last semester. In our university, we don't have to pay for toiletries ourselves. The university would replenish them every week by placing tissue rolls on top of the freezer in the kitchen, and people usually take with them no more than five rolls at a time. I was proudly one of them until it felt too cumbersome for me to have to go to the kitchen every week, or sometimes even worse, as toiletries are not something I always pay attention to, I would have to improvise when at the end of a restroom session, on the gray cardboard roll there's no tissue remaining. So I began to fetch as many rolls as possible from the kitchen. For the first time I did it, I took 25 rolls, separated into batches and carried by hand, to the bathroom, and then lined them up vertically until they touch the ceiling and I have to start another pile to the left. It was a rather dull way of placing them. And a week later, when I returned from Lisbon, the paper rolls have been arranged into the shape of a pyramid - not overly creative either, but new to me. I wondered for days, declaring with Husain that with this much tissue, we will never run out of toilet papers. Then I still lived in my girlfriend's room, and had just started to know him by playing games like Left 4 Dead 2 and Team Fortress 2 with him. Yet the pile ran out before the end of spring break and neither of us can believe this fact - I have been programmed in such a way that the default is an infinite amount of toilet papers, and Husain only went to the kitchen when he sees that there's no paper left and usually only brought one roll at a time. I have also moved back into my room. Hence later, more than frequently I had to ask my girlfriend through both bathroom and bedroom door for extra toilet papers. It's embarrassing enough that while sitting I vowed I would bring toilet papers later. Yet after I finished I always went straight back to my bedroom. It wasn't until one random day when I was cooking instant noodles in the kitchen that I saw the green laundry basket and the mountain of tissue rolls above the freezer that I thought of bringing all of them back. It was 32 rolls this time, and there are still plenty of them in the bathroom, in the form of a mosque. I built a mosque the moment I brought those papers back. Although Husain changed it to a more modernist architectural style, it wasn't structurally stable enough to permit the piecemeal retrieval of individual rolls, as is evidenced when once during the midnight, I tried to take one out and the entire tower of more than 20 rolls collapsed. I was conscious enough to prevent them from falling into the pond of toilet bowl, but didn't manage to safeguard the integrity of the entire upper half. Husain then later changed the towers to another mosque and place the rolls in such a way that the structure is always stable to take rolls from the top and the aesthetics not glaringly disgraceful. Husain and I didn't talk about these recent amendments. Because we haven’t talked to each other properly for the entire spring break, except for those times during the dinner when I still knock on his door and he knocks on my door, and we went down together to engage in some chitchat with either insipid or recycled joke.
Today is the sixth day into April, and also the sixth day into the two-month period during which my roommate is still staying on campus. The paper towel surely will not run out on the exact day of his departure, but must be sufficiently close to it to beckon its own end. And I'll will be leaving him before he leaves me. The Lufthansa flight I booked back to China is after dinner on June 2, and he's graduation day is a dozen days later. Both of these farewells are bid permanently to the each of us, in the sense not that we are not going to meet up in the future, but that we probably are, just not in this room on the third floor (fourth floor according to elevator button) in the east side of the College Nordmetall Building, not in the binding acknowledgement that we are roommates, and not in the realization that we can, legitimately ask each other to go down to servery and dine together. He's the most laid-out Afghan guy I have ever met, though I have only seen one Afghan in my life; and I'm the most laid-out Chinese guy he has ever met, although because we Chinese tend to crowd and flood everywhere, he has seen myriad of us already. We were supposed to be good friends, supporting each other in life because we both study Global Economics and Management, and we both find each other agreeable and have both betrayed secrets and sufferings of our own respective lives. However, destiny has already played out so that I'm a freshie first-year student who just entered, and he's a callous third-year who's about to go. And I'm born and raised in a culture that instructs me to accept such baloney.
Starting from tomorrow, Grand Theft Auto V is preloading on Steam - during the winter break of the first tissue tower, I went to Lisbon, Portugal and lent my laptop for him to play some games - he has played a lot of them, and I have said to him that next time when there's cool games, I'll be lending my laptop to him another time. His laptop is four years ago and there are indeed games that I'd like him to play - the uncensored version of Wolfenstein: New Order, L.A. Noire, Max Payne 3, Counter Strike: Global Offensive, and now Grand Theft Auto V. However, there's no more winter breaks for him at Jacobs University. And it's entirely reasonable for him, a 25-year-old college graduate, to refrain from gaming in the future. Therefore when he said several days ago, that he convinced two of his friends to play Team Fortress 2 with him, and that he still finds the game quite enjoyable, I decided, although I don't particularly like Team Fortress 2, I'd still play with him in the future if there's such opportunity, partly for fun, partly for the reminiscence of having shouted through the door for in-game communication.
