Imagine walking through the heavy doors into the grand lecture hall, stone floors with two floors of three hundred empty seats and a high ceiling with immaculately carved teal details. At the end of the descending walkway, the warm spotlight shines on a polished wooden table, split in half by a plexiglass and chairs placed on opposite ends. The usher seats you on one end and as you take a seat, you finally notice the person who has taken their seat across from you.
My stranger’s face is the only one I’ll see during this hour-long session. He looks young, perhaps in his early 20s. He has light skin and shiny, wavy golden-brown hair. He’s wearing a clean black tie and suit. His eyes look kind. He kind of looks like the boyfriend of an Aussie artist I follow on Instagram. I’m wearing an oversized grey turtleneck sweater with my hair tied up. We both have masks on. It’s hard to look friendly behind a mask, but I try anyways.
Everything is dim behind him, the light above bringing clear focus onto his face and the shared stack of cards in front of us. Each card has an arrow that indicates which person is to flip the card and read it or take its specified action. We aren’t allowed to say or do anything other than what the cards say.
It’s awkward at first.
We read the cards out loud and do what they tell us to do. He shows me different angles of his face. We take deep breaths. I become familiar with his eyes and nod. We stare at each other’s palms, faced up and then down, opening and closing. I am relieved that I cleaned my nails the night before, not realizing that they might be so closely observed today.
It’s rare — this time we get here to observe a stranger in such close quarters. Especially after this past year, our world highly wary of germs and proximity, our vision of one another has grown further distant and pixelated into what our screens can afford to show us.
I hadn’t met or spoken with this person prior to us sitting at this table. I don’t know anything about him or who he is. The most I can go off of is how he looks and presents himself, though I have observed things about him without words, too. He doesn’t appear uncomfortable with making eye contact, which makes him seem trustworthy and not socially withdrawn. When I ask him a question, he doesn’t rush to give his one word answer but takes thoughtful pauses to reflect before speaking. He has a sense of humor, as I could tell while we were attempting our hand formations. I don’t know much about him, but I already like him all the same. His presence is comfortable and safe.
After some time, I start to ease into the rhythm of our interaction. I appreciate that the cards allow me to set the pace of conversation. Breaks between each line of thought is normal here as we need to pick up new cards after every few words or are instructed every so often to look at our partner’s eyes or hands for ten seconds before proceeding. As I don’t know what cards will come next, I have fun reading my lines in different tones: playful, serious, inquisitive, melodramatic. Sometimes we are instructed to form objects together with our hands placed against our sides of the dividing plexiglass. I didn’t think there was more than one way to make a box or a mountain until my partner started to place his hand in a way I hadn’t thought of. We were perplexed at how to make a forest but he took the first try by placing his hands side by side against the glass and waving his fingers, like dancing tree trunks. I made him laugh by placing my open palms above his, moving my fingertips to look like fireworks of foliage above the trunks.
The cards had us ask each other questions that we could answer only with Yes or No. As I asked them, I found myself guessing at his answers in my head beforehand and then saw my story of him changing with each disclosed answer. Based on his look, I assumed that he was a music student. (After the show, he told me that he was an art student — I was half right). He didn’t seem like he was from California (I was wrong, again). He reads poetry. He can read music (piano). He doesn’t smoke cigarettes. He is not rich. The quickest answers he gave were to two questions: Are you stubborn? Yes. Are you spoiled? Yes.
Sometimes the cards had me look at his face while imagining something about him. Imagine him laughing until he cries. Imagine him without his two front teeth. Imagine him helping you up from a fall. Imagine him driving behind the wheel, for hours into the night. Imagine him arriving at a door, into the arms of the person he loves. Imagine him heartbroken. Perhaps it’s all the trauma from the recent months, but when the cards had me imagine something about him, I held my breath. Please don’t tell me to imagine him getting into a car crash or not making it home. Luckily, the cards didn’t go into that territory.
I can’t remember the last time I had such uninterrupted, tech-free time with a stranger with absolutely no agenda on either side. The only times for one-on-one meetings with strangers is usually for a date or for a networking meetup, both of which come with a strong agenda on both sides. Most of the time when we meet up with someone, we already have a basis of who they are that we use to frame our interaction with them.
For this event, the only thing required from both of us was to show up and participate. Making the time to be present and give the other person your time. By having cards dictate every initiative, there was no thought needed from us on what to do next. No stress with planning our actions, having to think about how to pivot the conversation, or mitigate silences. Most surprisingly, I found myself very much in the moment and not thinking at all about what I would be doing anything after the show or what happened before.
I spoke with him after the show and my curious nature was relieved to hear more about him so I could stop operating from the assumptions I still had in my head. He seemed less at ease once outside and then I was too. Was he open to answering more questions? Is he friendly? Does he not want to chat? Am I asking too many questions?
I waited after the event for my friend Caro who participated in the show with a different assigned stranger/partner. We walked slowly around the UCLA campus, admiring the impressive brick buildings and strolling around photo shoots of new grads in their caps and sashes. We spoke about how natural it was during our session to care about the person sitting in front of us even though we didn’t know them.
“Did you get to talk to your stranger afterwards?” I asked her.
“Oh no, she left right away.” Caro pauses. “I wish I did… but a part of me was also eager to leave quickly too.”
I nodded, understanding. “People are often more pleasant in our heads before we really get to know them, aren’t they?”
“Yeah,” she said. “Sometimes it’s tempting to leave it that way.”
I am thankful for the opportunity to have participated in such a special experience from 600 Highwayman at UCLA CAP. I feel strongly that if we had more events like this that allowed us to connect with people in an intimate, focused way, it would help us to routinely strip ourselves of the assumptions we make of other people and to appreciate the presence of people, more than by just their words.
My stranger’s name is Mateo. He’s no longer a stranger.
