For The Stranger In Red

 

If you’re the pretty lady who was sitting in The Palms food court on Saturday, wearing a bright red sweater over Ankara print pants, reading Buchi Emecheta’s Double Yoke, who didn’t mind a little girl coming over, taking you out of your fun and asking if you were married just because she wanted to ask if you would marry her father who was ‘sad all the time’…

 

I apologize.

 

And I want to thank you for being kind and understanding to a child who, in the most innocent and naïve of ways, thinks the way to fix loneliness is to find someone to be with. She doesn’t understand that two people can physically stand together – and yet be so far apart a whole equator can fit in the space between them. She doesn’t understand loneliness. Not yet.

 

But you do, don’t you?

 

I believe you do. That’s why you were so kind and patient and wondering what happened to her mother. Maybe one day, if the fates allow it, we will sit again, you and I, talk about the things that isolate people like us despite being in the crowded center of a crowded state in a crowded country.

 

Maybe one day. For now tho…

 

Thank you for understanding.