That person was me. Guilty as charged. I am addicted to striking up conversations with strangers and I apologize on behalf of me and the rest of my fellow addicts.
Maybe I can explain- you see, to me, this brief conversation, this tiny moment when our lives intersect at a tangent, gives me the biggest rush of happiness in the world. Somehow, just the fact that I exchanged words with you propels me to walk away from the scene with my head happily floating two feet above my shoulders and a beautiful new story or thought to tuck deep into the recesses of my memory.
I'm discovering more and more that I feed on stories- they keep me walking and living and laughing. If I cannot dictate them myself, I comfortably resort to those of others to give me the absolute bliss that my addiction calls for.
And in my meandering life I've heard plenty of amazing stories from strangers. I once walked two blocks in Madrid with an Argentinian doctor with a broken leg- listening as he recounted his travels around the world to help others. At Trader Joe's, I met a woman, who at 45, decided to quit her office job and become a nurse. Then there was the old Madrileñan man with the crinkly eyes and big smile, who took a break from setting up his daily newspaper kiosk to give me half of his "bollo" (or pastry) at 7 am when I was haggardly walking down Calle Ibiza after a long night out. These people, for some reason, have become part of my story- even if I only interacted with them for brief moments in time.
Ah, but is there no other cure for the conversational addict!? Are people like me bound to crawl through life, only to be dependent on the words of others for sustenance? No, there is a solution: the service industry! In fact, those jobs at restaurants, deli's, supermarkets, and other places are our salvation. They provide us with hundreds of short interactions with people on a daily basis!
So, to the woman in her late twenties who talked to me while I cut a pound of egg dough linguini- this is for you. Thank you for the suggestion to make an avocado salad and an omelet with a bit of Irish cheddar (I used Austrailian).... and thanks for talking to me. It made my day. Really.
Did I ever tell you about the time I was sitting in the grass in a park in Santiago, reading Don Quijote (in Spanish!!! gahhh!) and this 20-something guy came up to me and asked, "If he could just sit for a while and talk?" He said he really needed someone to talk to.
ReplyDeleteI said okay. He sat down on the ground and began to tell me all about how heartbroken he was that he and his girlfriend had broken up for what appeared to be for good this time. He said he knew he'd been ignoring her and acting distant but he was going through some personal issues and he had needed a lot of space. He told me a a hundred things. And then he got up, brushed himself off, said he had to get to work, and was off. Just like that.
During the conversation everything seemed so normal, and we talked as if we were old friends ourselves. Carrying on a serious conversation in a language I can barely speak, and swapping stories of love and heartbreak right there on the grass. Then when he left, I went back to my reading. A few minutes later I couldn't be sure the thing had ever happened. No one has ever approached me like that before. He was probably your Chilean soul mate equivalent. =)