The Space Between Us
I was standing in the grocery store aisle this morning, trying to decide between two brands of tea, when a little girl in the cart next to me started staring. She didn’t look away when I caught her eye. She just kept watching, her head tilted slightly, as if she were trying to solve a puzzle that only I was holding. It made me feel suddenly very visible, and a little bit clumsy. We spend so much of our adult lives performing, curating our expressions and guarding our reactions. We learn to look at things without really seeing them, or to look away entirely to avoid the weight of a stranger’s gaze. But there is something so disarming about that raw, unfiltered interest. It is a quiet demand for connection, a bridge built in the silence between two people who don’t know each other at all. It reminds me that we are all just trying to understand the world, one shy, searching look at a time.
This reminded me of the beautiful image titled Curiosity by Ryszard Wierzbicki. It captures that exact, fragile moment of discovery between two people. Does this image bring back any memories of a time you were truly seen by a stranger?
