Things we say to strangers

There comes a time when all the people we meet are strangers. On the streets, at work, in the cafes, on the planes.

Everyone is a stranger, and we tell them things.

It doesn’t matter what we say, because they don’t care. Or we won’t see them anymore.

It’s such a fascinating opportunity to make a new person of ourselves. We don’t have to lie. We just have to not say certain things. We omit mistakes, family members, years spent doing things that are not important anymore.

And it makes me wonder, of all the people I meet and talk with, how many are doing the same thing as I am? How many are showing just a side, a polished shiny side of them. They are like icebergs; they look different if you move a step away, different if you take a step closer. Different under the sunlight, and different in the fog.

Iceberg is a cold word. I used to think that people are like diamonds, multifaceted, and beautiful. Impossible to see them all.

Impossible to know them all.

There is a certain relief in the fact that no one will know me as well. I even don’t know myself.

I had a fair recollection of my teenage years. I thought I remember well what has happened and how I have felt.

That was until the moment I went home, after the passing of my father, and started reading through my diaries.

They were written in a time without global technologies, when I couldn’t always speak to people when I needed it. There were evenings I had come home, in my room, bursting with thoughts and feelings, and my diaries were my best friends.

I sat down by my old desk, my sister’s former desk, and took out my diaries from deep inside it, behind old textbooks and forgotten books. I started flipping through pages, full of writings and suddenly realized something.

I realized that I have been a very different person then. I was seeing myself through the rose-tinted glasses we all put on when we look back. The diaries forced me to take them off.

My diaries played like movie to me, and the scenes were subtly different. I had the director’s cut, and it was rough.

I have a been a sweet girl, full of questions and dreams. I found the notebook with my poems and started comparing the dates. Somewhere around the age of 16 I have somehow grown fangs. Rash, and impulsive, quick to take offense and shout, black and white about the world.… If I could go back, I would have probably spent hours with myself, trying to tell of what could happen, what will happen… I tore away pages, filled with scribbles that needed to be thrown away. Words that screamed with rage, words written with the sole purpose to hurt. If I could meet myself then, I would have been a stranger. A diamond with way too many sharp ends, still fragile and rough.

I saw my friends then with new eyes. There were details, recorded on the pages, that I have missed to notice really. Things my friends have said, or did, things to which I would have reacted in another way now.

It made me think. It’s scary how we change. We become our own strangers one day.