Hooked on strangers

When I sneakily pulled out the box where I keep my chocolate cookies from home, Inar loudly asked me why I brought a cookie from somewhere else, and the baristas at the coffee shop overheard him. I told him it was because it had chocolate in it and I really love chocolate. I guess kids put you in these kinds of funny situations when they're learning to talk and want to chat with whatever that shows a speck of movement. He told me that he also had a cookie and he put it in his mouth acting silly, almost dropping it, tempting gravity and his mom. While she called his attention, I imitated him with the rest of the cookie that I had left while he looked and smiled at me. 

I have always enjoyed the conversations you have with strangers in coffee shops, whether they’re older, people my age or, as in this case, someone 2-3 years old. In NY it is more common for a stranger to ask about your life in a coffee shop, though if it happens on the street I urge you to run and never look back. At first I was prejudiced and even the first time, I remember feeling overwhelmed when someone approached me to talk. However, some of these same people tend to be regulars, people who always go to the same coffee shop, loyal customers. I became one too, so much so that when I was in the thesis writing phase I went every day to follow a strict routine, and I ended up writing in the acknowledgments to the baristas and to my favorite coffee shop. And in the end, even though I never went beyond the barrier of starting conversations myself, I would stop what I was doing at the time and appreciate it when someone talked to me, because they were always people who, when you told them a little about your life, showed great interest in research or had such different lives that I found myself hooked on their stories, needing to know more. 

I miss that aspect of spontaneity and assumption that you will probably never meet the same person in the Big Apple again, and sometimes you even allowed yourself the luxury of telling details of your life that you might not share even with your loved ones. Of course, when I’m away from New York, I realize how much I appreciate its unique aspects compared to other cities. There is no other city like NY, at least in what I know. You become so absorbed by the energy that impregnates the city that it does not let you live relaxed until you go somewhere else and start thinking about how it makes you feel, the good and the bad. New York means loneliness, hard work, dirt, noise, superficiality and hostility, but once you learn to navigate its nooks and crannies, you begin to appreciate its energy and the uneven rhythm of the city created by the variety of its people’s footsteps. But New York is also novelty, the possibility of an impossible concept, a unique city in the States and in the world. 

It is amazing how a child in Donostia has led me to think of New York, perhaps because both feelings meet in the tenderness department in me. I cannot wait to be back in New York again nor meet Inar for another chat.

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