My Roommate Hüsamettin

Living alone is often presented as freedom.

You close the door and everything is yours.

The silence is yours.

The refrigerator is yours.

The bathroom is yours.

The toothpaste remains exactly where you left it.

Nobody finishes the perfume.

Nobody leaves hair in the bathtub.

Nobody brings strangers into the house.

Nobody borrows your things and forgets where they put them.

In May 2010, I wrote about all of this as if it were a disadvantage.

That was the joke.

Living alone, I said, had no excitement.

You opened the door and the house was always empty.

There was no unknown friend of a roommate waiting inside.

No couple who had somehow borrowed a key and decided your apartment was a suitable place for their private life.

Everything stayed where you left it.

The refrigerator remained full.

The toothpaste was never squeezed from the middle.

The house did not smell terrible.

What kind of life was that?

Too orderly.

Too predictable.

Too peaceful.

Then Hüsamettin arrived.

Hüsamettin was a cockroach.

I believe he probably came through the toilet in the bathroom.

I did not invite him.

He did not ask permission.

But he stayed.

And because a person living alone apparently has enough time to assign social roles to insects, I began treating him as a roommate.

At first he was frightened of me.

Or at least that is what I wrote.

The first time I turned on the bathroom light, he seemed alarmed.

Understandable.

Imagine living quietly in darkness and suddenly a giant enters, switches on the sun, and starts staring at you.

We reached an agreement.

The bathroom was his.

“Take it,” I effectively told him.

“Do whatever you want.”

That is not the standard response to finding a cockroach in the house.

But loneliness creates unusual diplomacy.

There are people who immediately reach for a slipper.

People who find spray.

People who leave the room and recruit somebody braver.

Apparently I chose recognition of sovereignty.

Hüsamettin occupied a corner.

He did not make noise.

He did not damage anything.

We got along.

The standards for a good roommate can become surprisingly low.

Does not make noise.

Does not touch your food.

Does not use your shampoo.

Does not invite friends.

Does not ask for rent.

Fine.

Welcome.

There is a strange truth hidden inside the joke.

When you live with other people, you dream about silence.

When you live alone long enough, silence can become too successful.

The absence of friction feels wonderful at first.

Nobody interferes.

Nobody asks questions.

Nobody moves anything.

Nobody makes a mess.

Then the house begins to behave like a photograph.

Everything remains in position because there is nobody else there to disturb it.

Order can become evidence of absence.

The perfectly placed toothpaste is no longer a victory.

It is proof that only one hand uses it.

The full refrigerator does not mean efficiency.

It may mean nobody else opened the door.

The empty bathtub is clean.

Also empty.

This is one of the contradictions of living alone.

You gain control.

You lose interruption.

People often describe bad roommates through interruption.

Noise.

Mess.

Guests.

Missing food.

Shared bills.

Different sleeping hours.

Different standards of cleanliness.

But some of those irritations are also signs that another life is crossing yours.

A cup appears somewhere you did not leave it.

There is laughter behind a door.

Someone comes home late.

Someone asks whether you want tea.

Someone complains.

Someone uses the last of something.

Annoying.

Alive.

Living alone removes many problems by removing the other person.

This is efficient.

It is not always emotionally neutral.

That is why Hüsamettin became funny.

He was the smallest possible interruption.

A ridiculous substitute for domestic company.

Not a roommate.

But just enough of a presence to become a character.

The story became better after a work trip.

I was away for a week.

When I returned, Hüsamettin was not in his usual place.

And according to the entry, I worried.

Had something happened to him?

This is where the joke crosses into something almost tender.

A cockroach had been in my bathroom for about a week and a half, and I had already developed expectations about where he should be.

That is all attachment really needs at first.

Repetition.

Something appears in the same place often enough and its absence becomes noticeable.

We are pattern-making creatures.

The neighbor’s light.

The street cat.

The cashier at the shop.

The security guard.

The dog behind the same fence.

The person on the same bus.

We do not need deep relationships with all of them.

We simply notice when the pattern breaks.

Hüsamettin had become part of the bathroom pattern.

So I looked around.

Eventually I found him inside a small bucket.

Good.

Alive.

Unfortunately, I needed the bucket.

This is where coexistence met property law.

The bathroom could be his.

The bucket could not.

I decided our paths had to separate.

I put him into the toilet and flushed.

This sounds cruel when written without the tone of the old entry.

The story treated the act almost like the end of a tenancy agreement.

Thank you for your time.

The property is needed.

Best wishes in your future endeavors.

Goodbye, Hüsamettin.

Then, that night, he came back.

At least I believed it was him.

This is an important distinction.

I had no scientific method for identifying individual cockroaches.

No markings.

No photographs.

No DNA test.

But by that point identity was no longer biological.

A cockroach appeared again.

Therefore:

Hüsamettin.

He had returned.

That was enough.

I concluded that there was something special about this animal and put him back in his bucket.

We would wait and see.

This is one of my favorite kinds of old entry because almost nothing happens.

A man lives alone.

A cockroach appears.

He names it.

He leaves for work.

He comes back.

The cockroach is missing.

He finds it.

Flushes it.

It returns.

That is the plot.

Yet it says more about the period than many entries about important events.

It shows the apartment.

The silence.

The work travel.

The amount of time spent alone.

The humor required to make solitude entertaining.

The fact that a cockroach could become recurring company.

Personal history is often clearest in these ridiculous fragments.

Official biographies would never include Hüsamettin.

Education.

Career.

Marriage.

Travel.

Projects.

Achievements.

Those are the usual categories.

But if you want to remember what a life actually felt like on an ordinary evening, you need stranger evidence.

The television series you finished because there was nothing else to do.

The insect in the bathroom.

The untouched toothpaste.

The full refrigerator.

The apartment exactly as you left it after a week away.

These details contain atmosphere.

The same entry says that boredom had become productive in one very specific direction:

I had finished roughly 96 gigabytes of television series.

That number now feels like a fossil from another media era.

The point was not the exact storage amount.

The point was that I had enough time alone to consume the archive.

I even offered advice.

Do not be afraid of a five-season series.

If each season has thirteen episodes, five days.

If there are twenty-six episodes per season, at most ten.

This is not the schedule of a balanced adult life.

It is the mathematics of someone who has discovered that evenings can be filled systematically.

When people talk about binge-watching now, streaming platforms make it sound normal.

Episodes automatically continue.

Entire seasons arrive together.

The interface asks whether you are still watching.

Back then, having a 96 GB collection felt more physical.

Files had to exist somewhere.

You knew the size.

You knew what you had.

You could finish the archive.

There was an edge.

The collection could end.

That made boredom measurable.

There are seventy-eight episodes left.

Now fifty.

Now twenty.

Finished.

What next?

Perhaps another series.

Perhaps conversation.

Perhaps Hüsamettin.

The funny part is that I had chosen to live alone.

The entry explicitly says that not wanting somebody to move into the house did not mean refusing every uninvited guest.

That contradiction still makes sense.

Wanting solitude is not the same as wanting permanent isolation.

People sometimes confuse those.

A person can need privacy and still need contact.

Can love living alone and still feel lonely.

Can enjoy an empty house and still occasionally wish someone else would make a little noise in it.

Human needs are not logically tidy.

We want control and surprise.

Silence and company.

Independence and familiarity.

A door we can close and someone worth opening it for.

Living alone makes these tensions easier to see.

Nobody else is available to absorb them.

If the house is too quiet, the quiet belongs entirely to you.

If you are bored, nobody can be blamed.

That can be liberating.

It can also be confronting.

The roommate joke works because shared housing offers a convenient villain.

The toothpaste is wrong because of them.

The refrigerator is empty because of them.

The smell is because of them.

The stranger in the living room is because of them.

Living alone removes the villain.

Now the toothpaste is perfect.

Congratulations.

What will you complain about?

Apparently I found a cockroach.

Problem solved.

There is another small truth here about naming.

The moment I called him Hüsamettin, killing him became narratively more difficult.

Before the name:

cockroach.

After the name:

Hüsamettin.

Language changes distance.

We know this instinctively.

Children name toys.

People name cars.

Boats.

Plants.

Robotic vacuum cleaners.

Street animals.

Once something has a name, behavior changes.

You begin addressing it.

Telling stories about it.

Assigning motives.

Hüsamettin was frightened when the light came on.

Hüsamettin had chosen a corner.

Hüsamettin disappeared.

Hüsamettin returned.

None of these statements can be verified from the insect’s perspective.

But the story did not require that.

The name transformed a household pest into a character.

Humor depends heavily on this transformation.

An anonymous cockroach is disgusting.

A cockroach named Hüsamettin who quietly occupies the bathroom while you are away on business has a biography.

The absurdity is immediate.

That is why people anthropomorphize animals so easily.

It creates narrative from behavior.

The cat is offended.

The dog is embarrassed.

The pigeon is arrogant.

The cockroach is my roommate.

We know we are projecting.

We do it anyway.

Because projection makes the world more social.

That may matter more when the actual house is empty.

I would not turn this into a tragic story about loneliness.

The source does not support that.

The tone is playful throughout.

I was clearly capable of making fun of the situation.

That matters.

Solitude is not automatically suffering.

Some of the best periods of adult life can happen while living alone.

You learn your own rhythms.

Cook badly or well.

Leave things where you want.

Sleep when you want.

Discover what you actually like when nobody else is negotiating the environment.

There is dignity in that freedom.

But even enjoyable solitude has long evenings.

Humor fills them well.

So does television.

So, apparently, does a cockroach.

The work-trip detail also interests me.

I left the house for a week and came back to exactly the same domestic world, except Hüsamettin had moved.

This is one of the unique pleasures of living alone.

Return.

The house waits.

A shared house evolves while you are gone.

People eat things.

Move things.

Open windows.

Close curtains.

Create laundry.

Use rooms.

A solitary house largely suspends itself.

You return and time resumes.

That can feel wonderfully calm.

It can also exaggerate the feeling that your private world exists separately from everybody else’s.

Outside, a week happened.

Meetings.

Traffic.

Meals.

People.

Then you unlock your door.

The cup is where you left it.

The chair is where you left it.

The bathroom is where you left it.

Except the cockroach has vanished.

Suddenly the smallest change becomes the largest event.

That is another reason Hüsamettin mattered to the story.

He was evidence that the apartment had a life independent of me.

Something happened while I was gone.

Not much.

Enough.

There is a kind of comedy in imagining the week from his side.

I will not invent specific adventures because the archive gives none.

But the basic inversion is funny.

Perhaps I thought I owned the apartment.

Perhaps Hüsamettin spent the week believing the enormous noisy creature had finally moved out.

Then I returned.

Turned on the light.

Needed his bucket.

Ruined everything.

Roommate conflicts are always about perspective.

The entry does not say how long this arrangement continued.

There is no final chapter.

Hüsamettin returns, goes back into the bucket, and the story ends with:

We are waiting to see.

That is a perfect ending.

Not every story needs resolution.

In fact, old diary-like writing often becomes more charming when it stops before life has explained itself.

At that moment, Hüsamettin was still there.

The future had not happened.

The reader is left in the same uncertainty as the writer.

We will see.

Digital archives preserve these unfinished presents.

That is part of their value.

Memory usually knows what happened later and rearranges the past around the outcome.

An old entry cannot do that.

It only knows May 12, 2010.

A cockroach came back.

I put him into the bucket.

We waited.

I like that.

It preserves the apartment before it became a memory.

It preserves living alone before I knew which details would survive.

And somehow, of all the details available, the one that survived was a cockroach with a human name.

That is exactly why archives are useful.

Memory has terrible taste in importance and excellent taste in texture.

You may forget whole months.

Then remember an insect.

You may forget what you watched among those 96 gigabytes.

But remember that the bathroom had a tenant.

You may forget what you cooked.

But remember that the refrigerator stayed full because nobody else touched it.

This is how ordinary life returns.

Not as chronology.

As objects and jokes.

A bucket.

A toilet.

A tube of toothpaste.

A silent apartment.

Hüsamettin.

If I had written only that I lived alone in 2010, the sentence would carry almost nothing.

Living alone is a fact.

Hüsamettin makes it a period.

That is the difference between information and memory.

Information says where you were.

Memory tells you what the bathroom felt like when you turned on the light.