Saturday, January 7, 2017

On Apartment Mates

I have a roommate. He wears headphones all the time. I wonder what he listens to. Sometimes he listens to himself play the electric guitar, with headphones plugged into it, instead of an amp there. I've never seen him eat anything that's not franks and mustard.

I have another roommate. His hearing is terrifyingly good. He can probably hear my bathroom noises. He probably knows everything. I'm so pooched. He can hear me through the bedroom door when I whisper out what I'm planning to say to him out loud, responding to what I say as though I'd said it to his face the first, and apparently not even noticing that I didn't. I said to myself this afternoon that I was going to take 20,000 steps today (I managed 12,000; people kept giving me rides) and he, though people don't always hear what I say even when I'm (to my own ears) speaking up, responded quite casually, as though I'd been saying it audibly for all to hear, that I'd probably need to walk to Walmart and back to get in that kind of mileage. But surely he must know that this is odd, otherwise he wouldn't act like he's the only one who can hear through walls, staying up until Ryan wakes, cursing pretty loudly at his video games. I wonder, since all he seems to do about them is bemoan his losing, if he actually enjoys them.

I wonder if he can hear what's going on in the headphones...

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