talking to strangers

it cannot be done to earn a reaction. it must be done for the love of the game

The sun has come out in Edinburgh. At the Botanics over the weekend I stood in the shadow of an enormous rhododendron, ogling, determined to share with someone the miracle playing out upon it: the thing was absolutely lousy with bees. Fifty honeybees at least, and that was just what was in eyeshot. The plant hummed like a machine. It was like looking at a Magic Eye—as soon as you focused in on one chaotic zone of movement, the corner of the eye flagged another, and so I flitted across the shrub with my gaze, as if reading. I loved what was happening, loved watching the bees dip in and out of each pink apartment.

I resolved: the next person who stays for longer than a beat is getting a piece of me.

My first victim approached. A man my age, alone, grinning a little to himself, at, yes, the bees!—he wants this, I thought. I hit him with my genius line: ‘There are so many bees!’

He startled, then smiled, and in a thick accent said something I couldn’t quite catch but felt like agreement; relieved, I think, he was able to quickly translate what I’d said. I loved the moment, his smile. We are seeing the same thing! Me from here, you from slightly over there! What a thing!

The man moved on and a group of friends replaced him, three students, and the girl in the middle said, of the plant and the bees, ‘It’s alive!’ and I thought, it is my time to shine, and I delivered my line again. The girls looked a little confused that I’d spoken; one said something like, ‘Ha, yeah,’ and the guy, shy and bespectacled, smiled warmly at me without saying anything, at least amused. They took a few pictures then moved on soon after. Still I liked my line and I was glad that I had said it. This is the first rule of talking to strangers: it cannot be done to earn a reaction. It must be done for the love of the game.

This sort of thing happens to me at the Botanics a lot. Beauty is a quick path to alliance. Two winters ago I went to the Botanics nursing a terrible heartbreak, hoping beauty might do something with it. I looked up at the wiry trees. I sat on a bench and felt dramatic and sad. Then, near the bench: a robin, looking at me, bopping around, tilting its head. I coaxed it closer and closer with some croissant flakes I had in my bag until I persuaded it, finally, to take a crumb straight from my hand. Two older men had watched the scene unfold. Grey-haired, polo-shirted—golfers, maybe. Buddies. One of them got talking to me about robins. ‘European robins,’ he said, ‘are actually a different species from—’

‘From American robins!’ I finished, in that excitable way that has been, throughout my life, interpreted as rude. The fellow didn’t seem to mind; he looked, in fact, delighted by me. ‘European robins have a symbiotic relationship with people,’ I continued. ‘They follow humans around because we turn up dirt when we walk and uncover bugs.’ I was proud to have an audience for this thing I knew.

My robin man teased his friend, who shook his head at our conversation. It transpired that this other man was not actually a big fan of animals, or nature, but his aversion felt almost sweet, storybook, like he’d been attacked by a swan as a child and had vowed to be upset about it forever.

Eventually we parted ways. I stayed on the bench for a bit longer, away, for that moment, from the heartbreak—actually feeling glad for it, since it brought me here, let me hold a robin for a fraction of a fraction of a second in my hand, introduced me to those men. Walking out of the Botanics I spotted the men ahead. As I passed, I said, ‘I’m not following you, I promise,’ and waved a final time. The light on their faces! Behind me I heard my robin man say, ‘Isn’t that wonderful, isn’t that something.’

I have not always been this way. I used to find this way of being very cringe. I used to say this: ‘I hate people.’ After a year of living in London at age eighteen I designed an entire outdoor persona around staving off all interaction. I’d been heckled too many times, reeled in on the line of my own gullibility by people with unloving intentions, men who guilted me into conversation, siphoning my company. To compensate I became cold and unreachable. I let my eyebrows sink. I walked quickly (try and catch me, suckers). Headphones, always. The message was clear: if you talk to me I will kill either you or myself.

This is not the way I am anymore. I am calmer and steadier and being outside no longer feels like being in a blender. I am, more than I’ve ever been, curious about the mysterious other, their potential for camaraderie, humor, genius, the delivery of messages, and general warmth and tenderness. Everyone is me, angled differently. This beautiful truth does not always reflect how an interaction with a stranger actually goes. But the difficult ones no longer feel like evidence that something is wrong with me, or that I am being taken advantage of.

Some brief meetings follow me for years, and return in funny ways. Two Christmases ago, headed home to Cleveland, storms trapped me in Charlotte and landed me for the night in a Holiday Inn. The next morning I got the shuttle to the airport, a six-seater van, with just myself and a couple, maybe my parents’ age, or a little older, polite Midwesterners. Affluent, maybe. I sat in the back. We were quiet. The grey wintry haze of outer Charlotte rolled past. It is weirdly intimate, I thought, to be in a car with people you don’t know. At some point we started to chat, which, honestly, I wasn’t thrilled about—it was early and I was tired—but we told one another a little of our lives. I don’t remember much, now, except this: their thirty-year-old son had recently died in Charlotte. When the woman began to cry I paid very close attention. I asked her for good memories of her son. She told me. Her husband was stonefaced. At the airport I said I’d like to hug the woman and she accepted. Then we parted.

Last week I got a comment on Instagram that began like this: ‘You probably don’t remember me.’ I did, of course. ‘We shared a ride to the airport and I didn’t know you but I suddenly felt compelled to tell you about Kasey. You listened intently. I think of you often just in our brief encounter.’

In our interaction I offered no sage wisdom, no poetry. As she said: I listened intently. That was all.

Sometimes the strangers will want you to listen. Sometimes you will just sit. A couple weeks ago I passed a woman sitting out on Princes Street, legs wrapped in a pink blanket. She was crying quietly. Her white cup looked not very full. People passed by, either not noticing or pretending not to. My immediate instinct: go to her. The critic said: you will be interfering, do not. I went anyway.

I asked if there was anything I could get for her. She did a crying-smile and blinked up at me through her long, tangly eyelash extensions, beaded with tears. ‘No, I’m okay,’ she said, and patted a sturdy bag of boxed things beside her.

‘Would you like me to sit here for a moment?’ I asked, and she nodded quickly. I knelt. As I got nearer to her I felt my chest unfold. My eyes pricked. ‘You’re gonna make me cry,’ I said a little self-consciously, then immediately felt stupid for saying it. She put her lips together, breathed out. We sat. A silence. Her breaths slowed. And then—I do not know from which part of me this came—I have never done anything like this before—I felt my mouth open before my critic could stop me—‘Can I pray for you?’ I said, for some reason, and was completely shocked by myself. What had I done? In the beat that followed I thought rapidly and desperately of a follow-up like, ‘I’m not, like, a Christian, not that there’s anything wrong with that, I just mean, I meant “prayer” more in a general way, a focused meditative attention way, “prayer” is just a word people understand, oh my God, why did I say that’—but the woman nodded before I could clarify.

I closed my eyes and took the noise from the street and the oddness of the situation and made a sheet of paper out of them and folded it away. Now there was only the daylight red-darkness. I imagined a column of light falling onto us. I held the column. I kept holding. And then the doubt came again, that I had been doing this for too long now, that this woman, who I’ve cornered into receiving my compassion, hated this, that she felt pressured into saying yes to this whole debacle, that I was being selfish for doing this at all, and this monologue pulled me from the moment. I couldn’t return. I opened my eyes—here again was the noise of the city—she was still crying. I gave her my name. She gave me hers back but I couldn’t hear, and the thought of making her say it again seemed cruel. I sat a moment longer. When it seemed right, I said, ‘I’m going to go now.’ The woman found my eyes for the first time since I’d knelt, held there, and thanked me. I stood. I reached for my usual script—‘have a good day’ obviously wasn’t the move. ‘Have an okay day,’ I told her, and we nodded at each other, and I went, merging back into the current of foot traffic. Next time, I thought, I will not talk so much.

The reaching is so clumsy. It is so imperfect. The game is that you do it despite.