There are days as I sit and watch the world go by and listen to those around me that I wonder if I’m in the waiting room for HBO shows.
One mom talks about her divorce and her ex’s divorces. Messy and messier still.
Another hands out homemade cookies and talks about the planned community they wish to move to. It’s its own city. Within a city. I wonder if she’ll start selling drugs.
The one that always comes late sits in the corner laughing forcefully talking about beer and remote controls and I can tell that the energy behind her laughter isn’t joy but I can’t quite find its source.
The woman next to me makes and receives text after text and pushes back her perfectly maintained thick black locks while reading about martial arts and running outside to take calls in a hushed whisper.
Alone surrounded by empty chairs sits the woman on her phone. Her younger son on her lap as she wrangles playground parents from her older child’s school.
And the grandmother who can sew anything. Like… anything… It conjures images of a seamstress in horror movies and things that have been sewn together when they, in fact, should not have.
Snippets of the dark side of their personalities come through and I can picture freeze frames of them at home. In the car. Digging a hole in the middle of the night. Smiling as they dress down a community of incompetents.
And I wonder for a moment about their real stories. The ones I don’t know and never will. That no one will. Unless, of course, they get caught.
CamiKaos 
I like to try and figure out which ones like to wear diapers, or the ones who like dirty sex, or whatever.
Ha
But the laughing lady scares me the most. That loud, nervous energy makes me crazy to be around.
Digging a hole in the middle of the night? I assure you, that was entirely compost-related and had nothing to do with bodies, evidence, or decomposition. Well, maybe decomposition.
I don’t really look for that sort of thing in day-to-day life, but ever since LOST, every time I find myself in an airport or on a plane, I try to match the other travelers to LOST characters.
Though, I guess I do sort of wonder what everybody is doing sometimes — not in an HBO drama sort of way, but in a regular sort of way. Like, if I take a late lunch and am walking around downtown, who are all these other people walking around? They can’t ALL have taken a late lunch. Are they college students that don’t currently have a class? Retail/restaurant/other people not scheduled to work that hour? Self-employed? Unemployed? Tourists? Big-shots that don’t have to follow regular work hours? At-home moms or dads doing shopping? Just who ARE all these mid-day people?