College Girl Sound Bottle Blues.

The college girls who live in the apartment across the parking lot/courtyard from me seem to be having some kind of small party to which I was not invited.

Whatever. That’s cool.

They go to the local Christian college anyway. Or, at least I think that they do. This is based on nothing other than my understanding knowledge of the local area, the churchgoing whiteness of the people who live in my complex, and my general impression of their demeanor (they have that warm but kind of pinched aura that always seems to imply, “Jesus said to love you, but I’m not so sure.”)

I don’t so much mind that they are having a party and didn’t invite me because I simply don’t believe that it is going to get dirty enough to entertain me, but it got me thinking. See one of the things that is really hard for me to deal with is that anyone anywhere is having fun without me. I mean, really, how could they be?

(This is seriously how my brain works, BTW. It is kinda awful to live with.)

I distinctly remember being in Palm Springs several years ago, at a business conference and laying in the hotel room bed with my then-wife and listening to the sounds of people out at the pool laughing and having fun. I think that I nearly had a panic attack laying there awake and listening to people enjoying their lives with out me! (It wasn’t a real panic attack. The first real panic attack I ever had was in 2007 a few miles above Southern California on a Jet Blue flight from New York to Burbank. I remember being in the little bathroom and realizing that once the plane landed my real life was going to start again and in real life I didn’t have anything or anyone to go home to. I’d never felt that alone before, or quite so small and meaningless. It was kind of awful.)

I have since spent a lot of time trying to temper that particular sort of ego-raging, but it flares up like a rash sometimes. I have the sliding glass door open right now and I can hear the blonde laughing of those college girls coming over on the breeze and I like to think that their soft sound waves are filling up my little apartment and that if I close the door now I can bottle that inside here and make these rented rooms into an echo chamber. A little perfume bottle filled with the sound of people enjoying life.

I think it is a nice thought anyway.


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