Strangers

I’ve been thinking a lot about strangers. About walking into a dark room, three strangers sprawled out on a couch. Your friend introduces you. You might never see them again. Here they are, these strangers, and that moment is perfection. You’re wearing a sweater. The girl on the right is wearing a similar sweater. You are similar. Her grey hair falls across her grainy cheek. You don’t know much else. The boy is sleepy. He yawns.
Strangers are so different than the rest of us. You can never enter their world. When you press ‘sandwich’ on the cash register, and the woman--Tina--on the other side of the counter smiles, all you know about her is that she looks like the type of woman that will find the exact change--$5.29--so you don’t bother with getting a penny, two quarters and two dimes out of the cash register. She leaves to fill her water cup.
I like dim lights and sweaters. I was warm once, inside the home of my first boyfriend’s grandma. It was December and her Christmas tree lights were the same as my great-grandma’s. I didn’t know his grandmother. I couldn’t talk about knitting and that was everything to her. She wasn’t very good at it and the scarves she made were ugly. Yet here we were--and she was still a stranger to me--and all I could feel was the same homesickness I felt at my great-grandmother’s. My great-grandmother lived on a lake and her house felt green and moldy and old. I was young and I thought, “We go here every year before Christmas” because that was what all the adults were saying but I didn’t remember much besides sliding across the lake in my new black shoes. My cousin had ice skates.
Are we born into a world of strangers? We can’t know but we can feel. I was born into a world of bright light and warmth. I was jaundice and they kept me under a bright light to take the yellow out of my skin. My favorite color is yellow. I lived with my grandparents and my mother and father. My father snuck beers within the shelving of his headboard. My mother cried because she I was jaundice and she laughed because I was her baby. My grandparents’ house still feels like home. They were never strangers. I grew through their home to the homesickness I feel today.
I like to create new strangers. I like to feel myself new to the world bright and blinding like sun on snow. I like old strangers. I like the familiarity of Tina as she enters Za’s to buy her sandwich and sit in the corner chewing methodically. She doesn’t know my name but she smiles at me when I ring her up. I like finding myself through the glimmer of strangers’ Christmas tree lights and warm sweaters. And I like that the dim light and warmth of others’ comforters reminds me of the perfection of my own dim light and warm comforter.