These were the women who didn't attend my Bible-belt private college. Looming about me, blending genders and discretions into a social mass profitable only at a keg party. I felt like the oldest one there, though it wasn't years that I marked myself with among these college students. I was the new person, the fifteen-minute curiosity who attracted the more bold and less critical like the proverbial moth.
A graduate student caught and held my attention during the last few moments of the party, and it is her name, among the two dozen or so who introduced themselves to me, that I remember.
She had kind eyes and a warm smile. She removed me from carnival-freak size to another party participant, and I forgot during our conversation about my crippling shyness in swarms of people where I don't have one particular person to focus my attention.
We waved fairwell from different sides of the street, laughing into the late night air, striding deeper into our separate lives, already removed from our brief encounter, lost in the patterns of our solitary selves.