You’re among new people, or perhaps just one new person. (Can you be “among” a single person?) You kick off a conversation, or they do, with some ready comment on the weather, or whatever’s going on in the background, or a neutral enough bit of recent news. (Like about traffic. Or the weather. Or. Well. Neutral is in the eye of the beholder.)
You’re not invested yet.
Maybe you’re indifferent. Maybe you’re looking for a way out of the conversation. Maybe you’re hopeful because something about this person has already struck you as intriguing, or you’re on the lookout for a new person in your life.
You keep chatting.
At some point, you realize the conversation has taken wing. There’s potential here, worth exploring.
You feel something new.
Curiosity about this other person. Excitement that you’re on the verge of something that could be wonderful. Anticipation. Exhilaration.
The rush of new friendship.
And also gratitude, that this person you so want to be your friend also wants you to be theirs.
It takes time to find people who accept you as you are, and whom you are willing to accepting as they are. It takes searching and filtering and remaining open to possibility. It might take more than a conversation to get there. It might take exchanges that last weeks or months or years. It might take a cataclysmic event or simply repeated interactions.
Or you might feel it right away. When you walk a few blocks together off a commuter train. When you ask about the password at a coffeeshop. When in line together at a bakery. When surrounded by people with seemingly odd senses of humor, or reality, or decency, at a hostel south of the Mason-Dixon line.
However it happens, and however long it takes, that sense that you’re reading from the same script, that you’re noticing the same details, that you’re on the same trail, in some way that matters—it feels inexplicable and fantastic. Like a spark. Like magic.
It does not grow old.
At least it hasn’t yet for me.
Don’t tell me if it does. I’d rather not know.
Grateful for friends deeply embedded and casual; distant and close; old, new, and prospective.
This Glass Has Water 