The Inner Lives of Strangers

Photo by Deleece Cook on Unsplash

I’ve always had the kind of face that people like to talk to. I call it “Resting Tell-Me-Your-Life Face.” It doesn’t matter if I’m sitting on the subway in New York, passing through a rest stop in Utah, or waiting for an order at the deli - someone will start talking to me.

For most of my friends this would be a nightmare; strangers talking to them out of the blue is a social interaction they’d avoid like the plague. As a writer, though, I’ve always considered it to be something of a superpower. I don’t have to search for characters. Characters find me.

I’ll give you an example.

Many years ago, on a layover in the Philadelphia airport, I met a man named Skippy. His wife had just passed away. He was on his way home from the funeral.

She wasn’t sick, he told me. He took her to the Cleveland Clinic, and she coughed and was just gone. Right in front of the doctors.

They were married for forty-two years. He was nineteen when he met her. She was forty. She was like Madonna, he said.

His eyes lit up when I asked her name, and he grinned like a schoolboy.

“Grace. Amazing Grace, they called her.”

She was a horsewoman. They had about six horse farms around the country. He was like a man in a trance, worrying about what to do with the farms and the horses and fretting because he didn’t want to lay people off.

He was 62 years old. His birthday was in a few days. She was 80.

He was slumped - aged from the sun, with Clint Eastwood skin and a Jack Nicholson belly. His hair was thinning but still red, and after forty-something years he still had his Australian accent.

Grace was the daughter of the creators of Ocean Spray juice, but he’d rather have her than the money, he said,

I asked how he met her.

“I met her at an information booth in Canada,” he said. “I was completely out of money. You know, I was traveling and nineteen. So I went up to the information booth and asked if they had any jobs and there she was.” He gestured next to himself and smiled, as if she was standing there looking back at him. “And she says ‘I have a ranch in Tennessee, I can give you a job. And that was it.”

So, love at first sight, I said.

He smiled, laughed under his breath.

“I tried to leave at one point. She hired a private detective and went after me. My mum was still alive then and said ‘Come home,’ but that just didn’t happen.”

They’d never had kids, he said. Never had the chance.

“She wanted to,” he said, quietly, “but I was nineteen. I didn’t know if I was leavin’ or stayin’.”

I’ve thought about Skippy on and off for a decade. For the short time we talked, I loved that stranger. For a few minutes he’d let me into his life, let me share his pain.

Ah, humanity, as Melville said.

Later that week, I looked him up (back then, the White Pages still listed everyone’s address), and sent him a birthday card.

Some people just linger.

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There’s a word I love, “sonder,” which John Koenig coined in The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows back in the 2010s, meaning “the awareness that everyone has a story.”

Sonder makes me feel deeply alive. To get a glimpse into a stranger’s life, to believe I know them just for a moment - it’s a high I can’t help but chase.

I go to cafes and eavesdrop on two friends gossiping.

I go to the pub and get invested in a couple’s first date.

But why stop there? The world is full of lives.

For years now, I’ve had a Google alert set for “obituary.”

Today I opened my email and found Albert, who ran the hardware store in his small town for thirty years alongside the love of his life. Al, as his friends called him, loved polka music, ice cream, and his twelve grandchildren. In his picture he has a warm, amused look in his eyes as if he’s just told a dirty joke that he knows is great.

Al has nothing to do with my life. I’ll never meet his family. I’ll never visit the little town he called home. But I’ve thought about Al all day.

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When I was a child, my family would go to dinner at Uno Pizzeria on Columbus Ave in New York and make up stories about strangers. We’d sit there for hours.

The young woman sitting alone in the corner became a spy; the waiter a depressive poet who had once killed a man in a fit of passion.

It was an exercise in character, in empathy. A way to pierce the walls that separate us.

We can’t know everyone in the world, just as they can’t know us. But we can make up stories, turn them into characters.

And sometimes, for just a moment, when a curtain is pulled and we’re allowed to look into someone’s life, we can see their essence. Their pure humanity.

The walls drop away, and, for a miraculous moment, we know a stranger.

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Maya Slouka writes Scrambled Eggs & Whiskey.