My mind goes on little trips while I'm commuting.
This morning: A parking lot outside the art space in Germany where we'd have punk/alternative nights. I was 18.
Yvonne smoking as I kept her company on the side of the building, sitting on a planter.
Two American soldiers struck up a conversation.
They were newly deployed to Paderborn. They missed their families. Friends. Didn't know what the hell they expected; this wasn't it.
He cried.
He knelt down in front of me and I looked off into the night as he hugged me and I held my hands on his back, and he sobbed, wondering what choices he had made and where it would take him.
At some point his friend did the same with Yvonne, the two of us in silence, two strangers taking whatever trust we were giving off to let it out.
I remember feeling it was surreal and uncomfortable, this pouring of emotion with a stranger that we are often too guarded to show with loved ones, and what a prized tiny nugget of the universe it was.
There are a lot of moments out there, daily, which wisp off into the universe; this one floods in at times, and I wonder: Did they find some peace? Do they remember this night when they were lost enough to abandon the guarding we do? Do they think, what the heck were we thinking, with those crazy looking girls? Or, somewhere is that guy driving down the road somewhere and one day in a million, this scene flashes out before him and he too smiles for the moment of vulnerability and connection it was?