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Lincoln Park, Jackman Avenue, Fairfield, CT

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But what is a stranger? Can they make us open up and reevaluate our own interactions with our friends and family?

There's a park by my house. and when I say by my house, I mean it’s right down the street, down the hill, down 2 minutes - or less. It's technically called Lincoln Park, but that’s not what it is to me. It's Jackman park, Jackman. It sits, snug in the corner of Jackman Avenue, not Lincoln Avenue. It's Jackman Park. I go there pretty much every day, to read, to swing, to walk, to sit, to see, to live. I love Jackman Park. I mostly go to swing if I'm being perfectly honest. I step out of my house, slam the door, leave it unlocked. All I bring with me are my clothes and my phone (with earbuds for music). It’s very calming, really, just swinging alone in the park with some good tunes. It smells like the evergreen trees that shoot up towards the sky, so far that you can’t really tell if they ever really end. The sandpit is forever empty when I’m there, littered with canary yellow toy trucks and miniature police cars left over from the little kids that splash in there on Tuesday mornings. But at sunset, just before dark and just after the golden hour, I sit on the swings alone, with the comforting sounds of American Football and Graham Coxon slicing through my thoughts so that I don't have to think about them like I do at home.

I like being alone in the park. Some may find that sad, but I honestly couldn’t care less whether someone else thinks of my favorite activity as “sad” or not. It’s nice to me, and that’s all that matters.

Occasionally, another person will sprint or stroll into the park, and sit down on the dirty faux-wood-plastic benches… or right next to me. This time, it was next to me. A young girl, who couldn't be over 13, plopped down on the swing right next to me. I felt the air shift as soon as she sat down. There was nothing particularly unusual about this girl from just a quick glance. But if you really looked at her, you would see how her small hands shook and quivered with the chill of the cool autumn air, and she looked like she was about one second away from violently sobbing. There was no denying it - this girl was absolutely and totally miserable. It was practically written all over her face! I felt awful for her but kept debating back and forth on whether or not I should say something to her. We both sat there, not speaking - me, pensive and anxious, and her, miserable and wallowing - for about three minutes.

Just as I made up my mind and decided to ask her if she was feeling okay, she got up off the swing and sprinted straight out of the park. I stared after her in complete and utter disbelief as she, quite literally, ran for the hills. After about 30 seconds of just gazing off into space, my brain kicked back into gear again, and I made a break for it, sprinting after the girl to ask her if she was feeling well (clearly not). I ran and ran and ran, but she turned the corner up around Fairmount and disappeared completely before I could even utter a single word. It was almost as if she vanished into thin air, like a ghost. I never saw her again.

But I thought about her. I must have thought about her every single day for two weeks straight after I ran after her. Somehow, this sad, sick little girl had enraptured me and taken over my psyche. Sometimes I still feel the strong urge (even a few months later) to seek her out and ask how she’s doing. She may not even live around here anymore.

I don't know why she’s affected me in this way; I only saw her for three minutes. But I think that maybe, just maybe, if I talked to her, I could’ve gotten to know her. Maybe we would’ve even been friends - just two miserable girls, alone, together.

The ghost girl of Jackman Park was one of the most recent impactful encounters I had with a stranger. Meeting - or I guess, not meeting - that girl made me reevaluate my own thinking in how I interact with strangers. Despite the fact that I appear very talkative and outgoing when with my friends, I am actually an introvert and quite afraid of people that I don’t know, regardless of their intentions. This encounter made me realize that I can’t just stand back and wait for the right time to talk, I need to make the right time for myself.

But what is a stranger… really?

I have had many encounters with strangers in my lifetime by now, some positive, others not so much. And I still don’t think I can truly give a clear-cut definition of what a “stranger” really means to me. But what I can say for certain is that we all have an impact on other peoples’ lives, whether we like it or not, and we shouldn’t be afraid of that! The ability to connect and impact another is a real human trait, and I don't think that we should feel ashamed or scared of connecting with other strangers for fear of embarrassing ourselves or seeming dumb. That said, we should take this opportunity to be conscious of others around us. Strangers can heavily impact us in many different ways, regardless of whether they mean to or not, and that’s okay! After all, what is a “stranger” if not just a friend you haven’t met yet?

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But what is a stranger? Can they make us feel ashamed as well as inspire us?

Picture this - My family had just gotten off the 7-hour-long plane flight from JFK Airport in New York to London. I hate planes. I hate all transportation. It makes me sick. I take Dramamine and don’t get sick, but I still feel like I’m going to get sick, but I don’t feel the strange sense of satisfaction that comes from actually getting sick, so maybe it’s worse.

We were taking “the chew-ube” from the airport to the hotel room. I call it the subway. The buzzing in my brain had finally quieted after getting out of the airport. The sharp, bright lights and fuzzy, reverberating shoegaze-esque noises of airports are like kryptonite for my head. The woozy side effects of the Dramamine make my eyes flutter closed and then open, and closed again and then open, but it doesn’t put me to sleep as I wished it would. My well-loved pair of white earbuds were hanging in my ears, but left unused, playing the same looped metal song on mute. My hand gripped tightly to the pole in a futile attempt to stay afloat when the train screeched to a halt. I closed my eyes again.

The first thing I heard when I woke up was the distinct shrill twang of an American Southerner. Quite ironic, considering my location! The woman speaking seemed just a little older than my mother, wearing brown cowboy boots and a sundress with the loudest floral pattern I’d ever seen in my life.

I could barely make out the conversation that she was having with the British girl sitting next to her (thanks, Dramamine fatigue), but I could tell that the American woman was drastically louder than the other girl. I pressed my hands hard over my ears, eager to escape back into the comforting lull of a satisfactory train nap again. I gazed over to the two women again, and now their lips seemed to be moving with gradually increasing sound. My eyes squeezed shut, but the drowsy cloud of rest never came. I internally braced myself for the riotous impact of the noise, but there was nothing I could’ve done to prepare for what I was about to hear.

“No cotton-pickin’ way!”

My stomach lurched. I feel sick. The southerner’s words hit me like a bullet to the head, my bloody brains splattering out all over the train floor. Her crimson red lipstick and poorly-bleached platinum blonde hair seemed to almost stain her words even further (if that was even possible) - American. For the first time in my life, I felt like an outsider. My eyes darted toward my parents, but they didn’t seem affected by the woman in the slightest. Thoughts stirred and swirled around in my head, and I could feel bile approaching up my throat. I feel sick… oh, the Dramamine only lasts for six hours.

As soon as I heard my call, “mind the gap!”, I stumbled off the train with my pink suitcase, held loosely in my right hand, trailing slowly after me. My mother held my hair back, and vomit quickly gushed out of my mouth.

I’ve lived in America my whole life, and although I’d traveled abroad a few times prior to this encounter, I had never once in my life felt as if I did not quite belong somewhere on account of my nationality. Was I the most patriotic girl in the world? Absolutely not. And I had felt excluded and ashamed because of my gender and Jewish heritage before, but it had never really scared me like this before. As soon as it happened, it occurred to me that I wasn’t quite in Kansas anymore - and the absence of that familiarity terrified me. For the first time, I had felt truly alone.

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New York City is beautiful. The sidewalks are littered with cigarette butts and coke cans, the roads are chock full of potholes, trip-hop blasts from some man’s shitty boombox, and the air smells like a mix of weed and piss, but it’s beautiful.

My favorite part of going to the city is just sitting down in Central Park to draw. The oak trees and the small plants sprouting out the sidewalk are just the same as Connecticut's parks, but somehow, it all feels different. There was one time when I was just sitting on one of the faded wood benches, just sketching whatever came to mind in my little blue notebook (it was new, too), when some man walked up right in front of me, dragging an old guitar amp behind him. He stopped right up by the tree to my 12 o’clock, roughly dropped the amp down onto the ground (oh, how I pray for that amp’s abuse to end), plugged in his guitar, and immediately started jamming with some of the most poorly-played chords I’d ever heard in my entire life.

See, to actual New Yorkers, there would be nothing particularly strange about this encounter - this was just another Tuesday to them. But, I, being about 10 years old and from Connecticut, was absolutely fascinated by this man.

He was tall (granted, everyone was tall to me) and rail-thin, with legs the size of chopsticks and long like a model’s. He wore a medium-length, shiny blonde wig, contrasting with the unkempt brown scruff littering the bottom half of his face. A cheap, tight scarlet red dress adorned his frail form. There was a thin slit on the side of the dress that went all the way up his leg, and the skirt portion was also clearly riding up from his brash movements. He stood defiantly in a shoddy pair of black heels with the soles partially coming apart, and a pair of fishnet tights that clung tightly to his fragile legs. His tangled wig was obstructed by a dirty, old straw hat, with a wide brim and the top half cut completely clean off. His hazy blue, Syd Barrett-esque eyes pierced right through me like a laser, and the prominent dark circles under his eyes coupled with his pale, milky white skin, black-hole pupils, and thin, crimson-painted lips made him look sort-of unreal, almost like a ghost.

I scribbled away and drew many sketches of him playing as fast as I physically could. It was almost as if my hands couldn’t keep up with the mass of ideas spilling out and over the top of my skull. His jerky movements and strange methods made a raw heady mix that enraptured me at the time (but of the likes that I can only begin to understand now). The sharp shrieks of his guitar stung my ears, and burned the insides of my mind, branding them with a somewhat peculiar kind of morbid curiosity.

He played for an hour straight, or possibly even longer (my parents dragged me away from the park before he had a chance to finish). I filled a full seven pages of my sketchbook with just drawings of the ghost standing right in front of me.

Something about this man was very intriguing to me. Maybe it was the way his fingers slid erratically over the strings, up and down and up and down and up and down. Maybe it was my little 10-year-old brain short-circuiting at having seen a grown man wearing a blonde wig and a short dress out in the open like that. Maybe it doesn’t even matter! But I never saw him again.

Did he impact me? Yes, because I am still thinking about him. No, because he didn’t mean to impact me. Yes, because strangers don’t have to have intent to impact. Intent does not equal impact.

Seeing that man was the first encounter that I can remember. Watching this ghost forever changed my perspective on not only capturing the form in my artwork (sadly, the original drawings of him have been lost to time in my basement), but also my relationship with the concept of “the stranger”. Before this encounter, I was scared of strangers, as I was told to be (“stranger danger” and all that). But after this moment, I realized that strangers can have a profound impact on our lives and that we shouldn’t be afraid of that, but instead embrace it with caution and free-thinking.