Strangers fumble around, punting niceties and passing weather-related compliments. Perfect strangers are strangers, but not always in the proper, idiom sense. Sometimes perfect strangers pick up where a ghost conversation seemingly ended, tumbling right into the dialogues usually reserved for 4 a.m. My ex and I are strangers because we don’t know one another really at all anymore, besides he’s blonde and I’m brunette. But we’re perfect because we don’t need those clumsy introductions.
We were 15, 16? We're friends now and we are not yet twenty. His voice is deeper, his voicemail greeting more professional, and his voicemails lack "Hey, love," but it's better that we lack that vocabulary; we had our fair run. He's different in so many other ways too, but I wouldn't know.
They say old habits die hard, but some habits don’t die. Not like that; if we were to meet now, I don’t think we would like each other. I must say though, my ex keeps me honest. We don't talk much, but we can message one another weeks apart, usually months, with just a, “Was thinking about you the other day, how are you?” I guess that's how adults catch up, or how they are supposed to.
We keep each other honest when we catch up, and I think that’s because we know each other’s hearts. We know each other's hearts because we dated as we were growing into them, figuring out our foundations, so to speak.
We must be honest because when we speak we remind each other of what our younger selves wanted: the bare minimums of what we wished for ourselves before money talked and job status intimidated and indicated.
He’s my perfect stranger, a blonde anti-idiom, who keeps me honest for the few chats we take the time to slow down for. And we hope we're doing OK.
