The Kindness of Strangers
Meg Elison is a Brooklyn author and essayist. She writes science fiction and horror, as well as feminist essays and cultural criticism. She has been published in McSweeney’s, Slate, Fangoria, Fantasy and Science Fiction, Catapult, and many other places.
Her debut novel, The Book of the Unnamed Midwife won the 2014 Philip K. Dick Award. Her novelette, "The Pill" won the 2021 Locus Award. She is a Hugo, Nebula, and Sturgeon Awards finalist. She has been an Otherwise Award honoree twice. Her YA debut, Find Layla was published in fall 2020 by Skyscape. It was named one of Vanity Fair's Best 15 Books of 2020. Her parasocial thriller, Number One Fan was published in August 2022 by Mira Books.
Elison is a high school dropout and a graduate of UC Berkeley. She lives in Brooklyn.
The cab pulled over to the curb, right on time. I stepped forward to catch the door, another woman getting out of the back seat to make room for me. After a week in Mexico City, my Spanish was at its all-time slickest, but I still wasn’t fluent. As the exiting woman stood there holding the door, I caught on to the monologue the driver was delivering to her. He seemed to take no notice of the fact that her ride had ended, that I was waiting, that we all had somewhere to be. He was complaining, I finally realized, about how his wife had left him.
The woman who was trying to surrender this cab to me turned her head to look me in the eye. She said no words and neither did I, but the whole conversation was in that glance.
Can you believe this?
Girl, I know.
He keeps going and going.
Like they always do!
It was in her small eyeroll, given above the roof of the taxi where he couldn’t see. It was in the purse of my lips. It was in her shifting her weight from one foot to the other, shouldering her purse.
Finally, I stepped forward and used my Bossy American Accent to ask her if she was done here, or what. She smiled at me with genuine relief, so pleased we had had our silent conversation. Silence continued inside the cab, and I hoped she walked in peace to where she was headed.
꘏
If we are careful, if we keep watch, these moments arrange themselves like oases in the desert. They’ve come to me when I’ve needed them most, when I’ve been in the desert of human kindness, suffering at work or at home. They’ve been enough to move me to tears, enough to make me believe that people are good and we can take care of each other. They’ve been drops to drink when the desert was leaving me dry.
꘏
I was walking into the grocery store in Maryland when the hem of my skirt caught on the upturned hooks attached to a row of hanging flower baskets. I’d snagged four of them and they teetered, threatening to attach to me like vegetal rappelers off the cliff of my dress.
But I’d hardly had time to register the impending disaster when a fast-walking butch caught up behind me, deftly unhooked all four in one fell swoop, tipped their hat to me before continuing inside. They barely broke stride. I was swooning; I was saved.
꘏
We all need to be seen. We need it so badly that we will beg people to see us, even when they’re committed to pretending we’re not there. Being seen in this way by a stranger can be enough to confirm one’s existence to oneself. We are our most solid in the vitreous fluid of the eye.
꘏
Kids defy physics all the time, and they get away with it an awful lot. But still, keeping an eye out for them when they’re in public is a job I believe belongs to everybody. It only takes a minute to lose track.
The kid was in front of me, leaning halfway out of the riding basket in the top of a shopping cart. He was leaning, leaning, trying to reach the acid-green suckerpop on the shelf above his shoulders. As he leaned and rose in the seat, he pushed the cart holding his weight further away, a little further within the chute of the checkout lane. Friction was in his favor until it wasn’t.
I caught him clumsily, his waist against my elbows, but I kept him from hitting the floor. His mother heard the commotion, already turning back to him and exclaiming over her totally forgivable momentary lapse.
She called out his name and he reached for her, scared but not hurt. His feet were still tangled in the cart and handing him over was clumsier still. When she got her kid, the mother looked at me with big dark eyes.
I’ve been alive long enough to give someone the look of disapproval, of how dare you make this my problem. But the look I was giving was it could happen to anyone, and thank the gods he’s ok.
꘏
A thousand times in my life I have tried to give kindness and understanding to someone close to me who was too wounded to accept it, too anxious to feel it, too hurt to admit it might help. A stranger presents a mostly-blank slate. Into that unknown, I have found we are profoundly capable of projecting good intentions and mutual care. It’s not enough to live on, but some days it’s enough to keep you alive. We, each of us, is a whole new world. Where our borders overlap, we are capable of such wondrous acts of translation, hospitality, and connection.
꘏
I called the man Beowulf before he spoke, and when he did, he was indeed a Dane. Six and a half feet tall and broad as a Buick, he stepped to the oyster kiosk in the middle of the San Francisco food hall.
“What do I do?” he asked.
An old woman looked at him over the pearly surface of the shell she had just sucked clean.
“Never had an oyster before?”
He shook his head, as big as a milk jug. “We don’t eat them in Denmark.”
I saw her take him in: he was eager, open, and wanted to try something new. She was wise, worldly, and wanted badly to be there for a first in this weary repetitive world.
I watched, we were all in line watching. She helped him pick a small, sweet Morro Bay oyster off the ice. She advised him on a little lemon, a little cocktail sauce. She shot one for his benefit and for her continued breakfast, so show how to savor but not exactly chew the little bivalve. He followed her example.
“I feel I have eaten a whole ocean,” he said, grinning into his new world.
Love Letters: Reasons to Be Alive is a yearlong essay series in which we acknowledge, celebrate, and examine the objects and experiences that keep us going, even through the hardest of times. The series is free to read, for everyone, forever.
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