The Mystery of the Cotton Balls

My very first apartment was on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. I lived on the 22nd floor of The Corniche (the title of which always made me think of my dad’s knockoff designer jeans of the same name) in a 1 bedroom apartment which was – say it with me – converted into 2. My roommate had lived there with her sister until her sister got engaged and moved in with her fiancé (also known in NYC as “Moving Up” Day). Perhaps hoping this would soon be the case for herself, my roommate declined to move into the actual bedroom which worked out well for me. Of course our living room was about half the size of that bedroom, but that’s just the way things are when you’re young and pretending you can afford to live in Manhattan.  We were coworkers and we had a lot of mutual work friends, we got stuck in the elevator together on my very first day and, standard roommate drama aside, had a lot of fun living together for the most part.

 

HOWEVER…there is one thing I still cannot explain – and that’s the mystery of the hidden cotton balls. Cotton balls then, as now, cost about 99 cents per bag. They are not pricey is my point. Which means 2 things: 1) I can afford and therefore have my very own bag of cotton balls, even in 1994 when I was making $20,000 and 2) I can afford them so much that I couldn’t care less who partakes of my cotton balls. And those 2 things are why it was so distressing each morning to have to search and rearrange the bathroom cabinet each morning when the bag of cotton balls was once again not in plain sight. I used them regularly enough so that when I woke up each morning they would be close to the top of the disarray of towels and blow dryers and other 24 year old girl bathroom items we kept under the sink. But no! Each morning I would have to search through everything. Not one or two things, everything. There was virtually no chance that one would use everything in the bathroom cabinet each morning, leaving only the bag of cotton balls inside to be buried when you hurriedly finished and scampered off to work. You’d have to go through 5-7 towels, brushes, washcloths, lord-knows-what to leave the bag of cotton balls alone there only to have it all piled on top. To reach the depth at which I found them each morning, they would have had to have been deliberately and purposefully hidden. I sure wasn’t hiding them; I was pretty much leaving them on top of the pile after each daily use. She had to have been hiding them, but - looking back at points 1 and 2 above – why, for the love of god, why? Why are you trying to hide my own cheap cotton balls from me? I always assumed she’d tell me I was crazy if I asked, but would love to hear any theories you may have.