'stranger'

As I write I am sat in a favourite French/Scandinavian style cafe; its insides are the expression of an atmospheric culture captured over many years.

Opposite me sits a girl, perhaps a little younger with her luscious hair than I'd realised but unlike on many other days where perhaps I'd ponder her beauty I instead sense, truly perceive the chasm between my inclination to talk to her while completely unknowing her. It is this that has consigned her to a stranger.

Likewise to her I am a stranger, on the other side of a gulf of never having met. Yet I am no longer indifferent to cheerful coincidence; as fate would have it when I moved my hearts home it was not to a place so totally foreign.. should it have been she would think me stranger with my alternate customs and attitude forged in a place much stranger for her.

Perhaps if we spoke my façade of stranger may acquire a chink, might begin to slowly fall away. I am struck by the arbitrary nature of the likelihood yet wonder at what point it is that I may know another human being enough that they to me are no more stranger nor I to they.

Sat in my favourite Scandinavian/French cafe writing I pause to think of the marvellous complexity buried in language; just how many different ways there are both to phrase and to interpret a fleeting thought, a considered idea. I sit, quiet, and wonder over stranger things that gave me just such cause.