Stranger

Stranger. Someone hitherto unknown. An outlier from outwith one's social zone, marking a space of unfamiliarity and unknowingness. Threat or no threat? This is the deep-rooted psychological dichotomy vested in our subconscious by our visceral and ancient instinct for survival. Fight or flight? Argue or parlez? The stranger in fiction and particularly in Hollywood movies is often characterised and read merely as threat or at least someone to be held cautiously at arms-length for fear of some dire personal outcome, narrative permitting. Yes, we've all experienced that nape of the neck feeling with the sound of ever closer footsteps behind us on walking alone on a dark night; waiting for whomever those footfalls belong to pass harmlessly ahead of of us. When I was growing up in the city, this was not an uncommon sensation, and it was only on moving to shall we say, a far less populous environment, that these feelings, though still there, were much attenuated and more manageable.

But what of those encounters with strangers that occur in broad daylight, in public and are not only benign but uplifting and genuinely human? Those wonderful chance meetings with strangers that become touchstones of human contact in one's life? I've written here before about many of my personal encounters with total strangers which, for an achingly fleet short time, turned out to be some of the most life-enhancing platonic and oh, so brief relationships, never to be revisited, and strangely all the more poignant for it. Chance, serendipity, personal attraction, mystery, and most of all, curiosity produces these precious nuggets of our time on this earth, when fantasy and reality collide simply and momentarily and become the most perfect fictions from which to nourish our imaginations in our internal life, found whole, for a brief time, in the world about us. When strangers become, for the briefest of times, friends...