i met a very nice family today. three generations of women who live in an apartment together. they had ants.
i got a brief look into their lives. a cross section that you can’t use to make any reliable judgements with. they were eating donuts and doing shots. the oldest was a grandma, the youngest was maybe 10. she was drinking soda. a real life hecate in the flesh.
and wouldnt you know it, they did my favorite thing; they ignored me.
im hesitant to use the word “voyeuristic”, only because much like “ejaculate” or “sensual” or “come”, its a perfectly serviceable word that has been commandeered by prudish individuals who have to use flowery language to describe cranking off their hog.
but listen. everyone dreams about getting to turn invisible sometimes and occasionally, when people are kind, i get as close as anyone can get.
i got to watch them interact. their daughter was asking about something before i’d arrived, and i listened to her mother explain that they hoped to move to an “actual house”. she expressed that she was really hoping the pre-approval would go through.
she talked about having a backyard and how much the daughter would like it.
and then i was done. pretending to be invisible is a two-way road, so i politely excused myself and sat in my truck for twenty minutes trying to resolve why this little vignette made me feel so alone.
i watched real people have real experience, and i also watched myself watch them. i don’t think they were watching anything. i think they were just livin.
theres probably a pithy new yorker cartoon in there somewhere right? some neurotic self obsessed man who’s so up his own ass he absent mindedly walks into a woodchipper and dies and goes to heaven, and he yells at his guardian angel, like “UH why weren’t you watching over me???” and the angel, in a sort of woody allen way, says something like “you seemed to have it covered”.