Sugar and Spice… Glimpses

I’ve always been fascinated by people. Faces. Voices. Hands. How skin, soul and skeleton come together to make someone who looks, laughs, loves just like you do.

How there’s no one who does what you do exactly the way you do it.

How people have lives full to the brim with things that I may never know anything about and how my life, with all its ups and downs and smiles and frowns and tears and laugh-so-much-you-can’t-breathe moments, is something 99.9% of the world out there will never spare a thought for.

People have lives and sometimes they’re terrible and sometimes they’re terrific. People have lives and they’re amazing and heartbreaking and soul-shaking and there’s an infinity of infinities within their existences and it’s just so mind-blowing to think about.

I’ve always been fascinated by people and their lives and more specifically, the tiny part I play in even a stranger’s day, even when I’m just right in front of them in a queue in Pick n Pay, even when I’m just the person they accidentally bump into on their way to wherever they’re going, even when I’m just the person smiling awkwardly at them in an elevator (because what else do you do when you share that small of a space with a stranger?).

I’m fascinated by the glimpses into the lives of people I’ll probably never know I’m afforded just by doing something as simple as living mine. Glimpses that may be just 0.001% of the entirety of their lives but that change mine ever so slightly all the same.

Last Friday was one of those days that saw me shirking anything that can speak in search for a little alone. Maybe home or maybe the quiet comfort of the cinema where no one looks at you funny for brushing away a tear or sniffing just a little too loud. One of those days.

And of course, on exactly the day any distance between my skin and anyone else’s was too damn close, I found myself wedged in between two women in a cab crawling towards Khomasdal in pay-day traffic.

I had just been thinking “how much worse can this day get?” when, in the lap of the lady next to me, something caught my eye. Judging by the wonder she stared at it with, it must have been the sonogram of what I assume to be her first ultrasound. Trying to be sneaky about it, I glided an eye over her. With not even enough belly to bulge yet, she sat there, completely oblivious to anything and everything that wasn’t the black and white picture of a still-fuzzy future in her lap.

I don’t know her name or the first thing about her, but for those few moments in that home-bound taxi, my life collided with hers in the most gentlest of ways. If I blinked, I would have missed it. But I didn’t and that little glimpse of her and her unborn’s life was the best part my day.