She's Such A Snob

"She's such a snob."

"Who is?" I asked, half asleep.

"Your Mom." Keith mumbled from the right side of the bed. My eyes shot open. I was immediately wide awake and on the defensive.

"You don't even know my Mom." I snapped, now sitting upright and ready for a verbal altercation. I looked over to my right and realized that my future husband had been talking in his sleep. "That's weird" I thought to myself. "Keith." I said. Nothing. "Keith". Silence. No response. He was completely, absolutely 100% asleep. After a few failed attempts to elicit a response from the slumbering talker I laid back down and eventually drifted off myself with no more disturbances during the remainder of the evening.

The next day over coffee, I asked Keith if he remembered the sleepy incident from the night before and he swore to have no recollection of any of it. We laughed it off and thought nothing further of the matter.

In the dead of night a few weeks later, Keith shot out of bed around two or three in the morning as if all hell had broken loose. He made a mad dash for the bedroom door yelling "The bathtub's overflowing!! The bathtub's overflowing!!!" Practically tearing the door from its hinges, he ran down the hallway only to return moments later, shuffling his feet along the carpet, not saying a single word. He slowly made his way back into the bedroom, crawled back under the covers and within thirty seconds, light snoring was audible from his side of the bed. My eyes open and brain completely confused, I remained lying on my side,"What the ---- is going on?" I silently asked myself.

It was during this time, that I also began to notice some strange "goings on" in the kitchen. My mornings would start off as normal as any other. I would wake up, get out of bed, wipe the sleep from my eyes and paddle off to the kitchen to start a pot of coffee, but things were never left the way they were the night before. Only occurring between the hours of 11p.m to 7a.m, a mysterious mess would be made and left for clean up as if someone had cooked something, but failed to finish the task. Peanut butter smears would jump out at me from the countertops, my eyes would lock onto fingerprints made of jam and chocolate pressed onto the light switches and refrigerator door, cereal boxes torn open with no regard for the crispy flakes inside. It was as if some sort of "Wild Planet" animal eating frenzy had unfolded just moments before I rounded the corner. God forbid if there was ice cream in the freezer because it wouldn't last more than 24 hours. Cartons of Chocolate Moose Tracks and Fudge Ripple left on the kitchen counter practically licked clean, housing nothing more than a lone spoon hidden well below the confines of the sticky sided containers. Did we have mice? Were there kitchen gnomes living in our walls?

"Keith, what is up? Why are you eating all of our food?" I asked one sunny morning over breakfast.

"What are you talking about?" He replied. "I didn't eat anything."

"What do you mean you didn't eat anything? Half of our groceries are gone, dude." We looked at each other, both equally confused. "Are you eating in your sleep!?" I asked, half accusatory, half bewildered. It was then that he admitted to me that he has, in the past, occasionally and unknowingly partaken in an eat/talk/walk whilst sleeping activity, oftentimes not remembering any smidgen of his "nightly adventures". He even revealed that he has eaten so much at times that he has become physically ill, the end result culminating in an upheaval of any and all stomach contents the following morning.
I accepted this quirky trait actually finding quite a bit of humor in the various "sleep/eat incidents" until it spilled over to our then roommate's fine European chocolates...

Our roommate Cortney had studied abroad in Sweden during college and while she was there, she developed quite a taste for a certain Swedish candy bar unavailable to us in The States. One summer, a friend of hers that she became acquainted with overseas had come to Los Angeles for a visit. Her friend was considerate enough to remember her affinity for these particular chocolates and brought an ample supply as a gift. Cortney was ecstatic, completely through the roof with sugared excitement. Parading through the house she exclaimed to us all how much she simply adored these chocolates, that they could not be beat. They were the best things on earth.

A few days later, I heard her cussing up a storm from the other end of the apartment. I walked down the long, narrow hallway leading away from the living room and towards her bedroom. Timidly peeking my head through her half opened door and said, “Hey Cort, you okay? What’s up?”

She looked up at me, the box of chocolates in her hand, “My brother Kyle is an asshole. He knows how much I love these chocolates and he ate one. Asshole.”

“Dude, that does suck. What a bummer.” I replied, feeling sorry for her chocolate plight. After a brief discussion regarding the greedy actions of her brother, I turned around and headed off returning to my previously interrupted activities.

The rest of the day passed as any other and I eventually relayed the story to Keith of how Cort’s selfish and unthinking brother ate some of her nearly impossible to obtain chocolate treasures. “That sucks.” Keith stated. “Cortney really likes those chocolates.” He then reached into his shirt pocket to retrieve a pack of cigarettes, but instead of extracting his Parliaments, Keith pulled out a certain wrapper to an incredibly hard to obtain Swedish chocolate candy bar. My mouth hung open in horror. Keith looked up at me, terror in his eyes. The wrapper slowly fell from his hands and silently dropped to the carpet, our eyes glued to the evidence now lying on the floor.

“Oh no.” I gasped. “What are you going to do?”

“Maybe I shouldn’t say anything.” He whispered, “She thinks Kyle did it.”

“You can’t let Kyle take the fall. You have to tell her what happened. Explain that it was an accident and you didn’t know.”

“You’re right.” Keith said. He resigned himself to the fact of having to come clean, to "take it like a man". Gathering all of his strength, he stood up, pulled his shoulders back, took a deep breath and prepared for war. As he reluctantly headed off towards Cortney’s room I hoped that I would see him again someday.