A letter to no one

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Hey,

I was thinking about something, and I wanted to talk to you about it. I wanted to ask why don’t we become strangers. Strangers, who meet up coincidentally, like travelling companions, or two persons sitting on the same bench at the railway station, waiting for two different trains. Why don’t we become just like that?

We won’t ask useless questions like “how are you”, but our questions would be more like “who are you” (though the wording would be politer). We won’t stupidly pretend that we know each other so we will ask all sorts of questions, questions about those things that even our friends don’t know but they never ask about. We will listen to the each other’s experiences like villagers of a far-flung area listening to a foreign traveler. But we won’t be talking about our travel adventures, we will talk about our little not-so-special life adventures, our mistakes, our learnings, our thoughts. Knowing that we know so little about the other person, we won’t judge them or highlight their mistakes or give useless advice, rather we will just listen to them, laughing when they laugh and feeling sorrow when they tell something sad.

During our chat, it would come to our mind, “why bother telling this deepest of your uncensored thoughts to this stranger”, but then we’ll answer in our head, “what bad will telling them do; after all, we won’t be ever seeing each other again”. Telling our deepest of thoughts won’t matter much to us but listening to those of the other person surely will. And we can’t listen if no one tells. So, later, we would be glad to have talked.

Every now and then, we will fall silent, sometimes for shorter period and sometimes much longer. We will be okay with that because at that time, we would be contemplating on what we had talked about and on our recently refuted misconceptions that were previously unknown to us. When we will talk again, the preceding silence will not bring any awkwardness, rather it will add depth to our conversation.

Suddenly, something will happen, like a stop comes in bus, or a train arrives at a station. Before the stranger says something, we will know they have to depart. A sad sensation would pass through us without our permission. But we will know that we are travelers of different destinations and it make no sense taking someone else’s journey. So we will bid them farewell with a smiling face, and start preparation of the journey of our own.

I wanted to ask you why don’t we become strangers? Why don’t we, the unacquainted travelers-of-different-destinations, become who we really are?

Yours,
A stranger

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This was his last entry in the journal he left behind.