My reply

I put this on her door after I cleaned the rest of my dishes and put away and organized anything in the way.

Luccie

I know that you and I have different notions of how clean our apartment should be, and I realize that I haven’t been able to do much cleaning recently for one reason or another. I know that it took you a lot of time to clean up this morning and I apologize that you did all that work because of me, and I will definitely not leave such a mess again. I also will do more regular cleaning and try not to get the living room that dirty again either.

We both like to wash our dishes in a different way, and I’ll try to be more timely and organized about leaving dirty dishes out on the counter. I apologize also for eating the chocolates you left out; I’ll try to remember to replace them once we come back for next term. My behavior in that has been unacceptable and I know that you wouldn’t have felt the need to leave me a note had there not been so much of a reason to do so, and I feel bad that you were put in that situation and I’ll be careful not to be so careless in my cleaning from now on.

However, that being said, I also feel that I need to tell you, without making excuses for my behavior that, this probably wasn’t the best way for us to have come to this point. I realize that sometimes you take it upon yourself to organize and clean up after me and I think that this hasn’t been the best thing for us as roommates. I realize that you have younger siblings and that you don’t want to have to look after me like I was one. But instead of organizing my dishes, or put my part of the pantry in order, you have to realize that since those sort of things don’t bother me, I’m not going to do so myself – unless you ask me to.

From now on instead of letting me blithely ignore the organization that is important to you, it would be better if you left me a note or confronted me about it, because I would be perfectly happy to clean up whatever is bothering you. I realize that by asking you to do something like that might not be something that you would like, but I honestly cannot see how my behavior would infuriate you, so I am always blissfully unaware of what annoys you.

Because we only have a term left, I feel that we could come to a resolution in our relationship that would work for both you and me. I hope that you can forgive my behavior and I will strive to be a better roommate to you from now on.

Shannon