My words for today are scrawled in blue ink across the back of a NJ Transit ticket, having been penned in a place that is neither here nor there, but rather suspended infinitely between the two: the midpoint of meditation.
As my train throttled eastward, I couldn't help but notice the passengers around me—from the infant being burped in Mommy’s lap to the old man coughing into the empty seat beside him, the entire spectrum of life existed on this train. Surrounded by strangers, I found myself wondering: what are their stories? Where do they come from? Where are they going?
This past June, I was drifting off in the window seat on my flight to Buenos Aires when the elderly woman beside me tapped me on the shoulder.
“Hola. Cómo te llamas?”
And that was all it took.
About 45,000 feet above the Amazon Rainforest, I learned that this stranger would be my neighbor for the summer—in a city of three million, she lived a mere three blocks down from my homestay.
Hours later, when the plane entered its descent and the woman slipped me a business card and the promise of assistance (and good alfajores) in her hometown, I couldn’t help but marvel. The world is so big and yet, in moments like this, so very, very small.
As the train pulled into Penn Station last week, I smiled at my serendipitous summertime memory in the clouds. Now, here I was—another station, another story, everyone headed somewhere else yet suspended together for these brief moments in time. Who knew what these strangers might mean to each other without even knowing it? Maybe five years from now, the businesswoman scribbling into her Moleskine planner would find herself penciling in an interview with Briana Pagano, or perhaps the boy strolling past with his stack of paperbacks would one day watch me walk down the aisle, veiled in white. Then again, maybe we were all simply destined to remain strangers.
Can heartbreak be waving goodbye to the possibility of knowing someone?
I think this is why I want to be a writer—to piece together the jumble of stories that hide in the forgotten corners of everyday life, to ensure that even in parting with people I will never know, we do not remain strangers.
And so I sit back and allow myself to be transported: from Point A to Point B, with seven billion stories in between.
