Perfect Strangers
June 27 2014


The perfect strangers
who surround us everyday.
Ebb, flow, part
as we make our way
to corner shops, desk jobs,
the bus stop

near home.

Other obstacles
you have no trouble dodging.
Locked bikes, minus their seats,
scrawny trees
that could use a good watering.
And fire plugs 
which don't bring up

annoyance, fear, disgust.

So unlike

this jostling crowd of us.

The sea of people, the water in which we swim
feels over-heated, wind-whipped,

too impure

to even dare sipping. 

As skin-to-skin
the subway sways
against a clammy stranger;
as perfect an alien
as I am to him.
But this earnest kid
feet dangling playfully
beamed a smile my way.
It was automatic, smiling back
and I did.

How great it felt;
perfect strangers
immersed in the same Sargasso Sea,
blowing bubbles for kicks
and watching them pop.

Different fish
in the fast current
more similar than they thought.
Who briefly let themselves drift
instead of swimming quite so hard.


The theme of a recent DNTO episode (a CBC radio story-telling broadcast/podcast) was "get(ting) strange with strangers". The expression "perfect strangers" came up, and the inherent tension of this word immediately seized my imagination: "perfect" meaning both absolute and ideal.

In the anonymity of the big city, in this age of time pressure and congestion, other people become easily dehumanized: they are simply impediments and obstacles, no different from street furniture and other objects. But in all of these stories, the encounters are the opposite: they are all about affirmation, uplift, unexpected pleasure. Which is what you'd expect of human beings, such an intensely social animal.

When I think of city crowds, the feeling I get is of a hot and humid place, of claustrophobia verging on submersion. So the idea of water as metaphor came easily. "Alien" reinforces the first connotation of "perfect": that of the absolute stranger. The small imagined anecdote -- taking the small risk of opening up -- evokes the other.

(I do realize that the doldrums of the "Sargasso Sea" contradicts "fast current". So perhaps Sargasso Sea should be interpreted as more of a psychological place; while the fast current is the actual speeding train.)

Not that this is me. I'm the worst stranger:  putting my head down in my hermetic bubble and plowing on ahead, oblivious. I don't easily meet stranger with either confidence, or the expectation of pleasure. Even though I’m sure I'd be better off if I did!