Night Sounds

One of the things that's taken me a long time to get used to is how different the world sounds at night here in my apartment complex compared to when I lived with my parents, on a typical suburban neighborhood.

There's always some strange voice or conversation being heard somewhere, it seems. Often times, I find myself wondering about my fellow apartment dwellers, because it's a never-ending source of... well, not quite amusement, but certainly interest that I've lived in the same unit for over a year now, and yet I know nothing about the vast majority of the people around me.

Perhaps it's a result of the more transient nature of this community. There was an entire family in the unit below mine, with kids and everything, that just up and left the other day. It was a little surprising, to say that least; I was always used to the kids leaving all their annoying little toys out on the sidewalk. I can't say that I miss it, in fact, but it did strike me as odd, to know that those people are gone.

For some reason, whenever I hear the voices of my neighbors outside my window at night, it creates within me a profound, venomous feeling of disdain for them. You might argue that, well, of course I'd feel annoyed, after all, it's just indecent of folks to make that level of noise after a certain hour. And I imagine that, were I trying to sleep, I would say that's true. But I'm not here trying to sleep, am I? Not yet, at least.

It's very strange, the feeling that the sound creates within me. I don't generally consider myself to be a particularly angry individual, far more of the "live and let live" attitude. I generally find I'm patient and tolerant that vast majority of the time, until night falls, and then, patience becomes a very strange form of hatred. It's as though the night has stripped away whatever layer of human connection I might have felt for my fellow apartment dwellers, so that when I hear their antics, my reptile-instinct brain is repulsed by why it considers to be the braying of inferior mules.

It actually wouldn't surprise me, to hear that the source of my irritation is wholly rooted in some vestigial aspect of the brain untouched by our evolution as a species. Because there's no other explanation for why it bothers me so much. It's not like it's keeping me up, because I'm not trying to sleep. It's not because I routinely hate the business of others. It's just the sound of voices, the way it carries, that sets me teeth on edges, makes me feel tense and irritated and yes, sometimes furious. That's always the worst part, to be honest, to have this unfocused anger provoked by a nebulous tormentor (an unseen voice) with no possibility of either explaining or resolving it.

Sometimes, I wonder if this just indicates some latent form of psychosis buried within my brain, and I suppose there's really nothing that could rule out that possibility except for my fond wishes to the contrary.