At the store today an older man dropped his keys and couldn’t reach them from his wheelchair. He called out and I walked over to help. As I leaned down to pick up the keys, though, I hesitated. I haven’t been near someone I don’t know since February, before the pandemic.
He noticed my slight pause and said, “Sorry you have to touch them.”
I mumbled a quiet “it’s okay,” through my mask and our interaction was over.
Before the pandemic hit and social distancing became reality, I was with a gaggle of Ukrainians at a fish fry. People were everywhere, on top of each other, jostling, and I was squeezing past tables and grimacing while kids ran around my feet. Whenever someone said something to me in Ukrainian I just smiled stupidly and melted slowly backward into the crowd.
From there I was invited into a stranger’s home for a cup of coffee. I went, traipsing up narrow stairs into a little apartment where I sat at a long dining room table, sipping espresso and nibbling chocolate while making stilted small-talk with someone I didn’t know.
On my way home I realized I’ve never treated a stranger like family in the way this person did with me. But I want to.
I’d rather live my life that way, than the way I lived it before I knew them.
Fast forward and I was eating Georgian food at a warm, cozily-lit restaurant in Washington, D.C. with this stranger-turned-friend. We passed plates of steaming food — meat and bread and cheese — and drank wine. We went out dancing that night on U Street, and a man with a portable keyboard appeared at our sides.
He walked next to me, serenading us with a John Legend song until we joined in singing. People on the street smiled and laughed, and someone yelled, “Louder!”
I’ve never been the kind of person to walk up to strangers and offer a song, but people like that exist. Thank God.
Not long after, I was on a first date in a crowded dive bar, sharing gin and tonic with a man telling me stories of Lebanon. I wandered outside with him to share a cigarette and we let our shoulders brush as we watched the people walking past and…
