I sat next to her on the plane. We said almost nothing after I asked if the middle seat was already taken. It wasn't taken. I sat down.
She ate some humus and crackers out of a little snack-pack. I'd had that same snack earlier in the week.
She was wearing a blue sweater in a color blue I love. A kind of chalky blue that looks good with jeans.
I was tired after a long week of work, too tired to strike up a friendly conversation and find myself trapped in an hour of talking. I'd made that mistake too many times on plane rides. Most conversations were friendly but few were really memorable and I was never able to find a way to shut them down without feeling badly. So I said nothing.
I liked her. The sweater. The humus. And, when she drifted off to sleep, I felt happy knowing that she was getting some rest.
She had no name, no career, no opinions. But she felt just familiar enough to be known . . . and she became company on my short ride home.
People tell me all the time how they don't know themselves, how they are strangers to themselves. But they are not strangers to themselves. They simply have parts that remain mysterious. They know some things and don't know other things.
Perhaps strangers are not even strangers. We know what we know and don't know what we don't know. But what we do know might be enough to feel something familiar. And that familiarity takes the strangeness away.
So there we were. Together. The same.