Elde has been seeking strangers for four years. The practice began after she noticed something she could not initially name: her interactions with people she knew had become legible. Not hollow. Not bad. Legible. She could feel the shape of what was expected from her in any given moment, and she could feel herself filling it. She had assumed this was just social function, the ordinary grooves of long familiarity.
Then she read the research. The correlation between familiarity and choice-constraint was not a metaphor. Autonomous decision-making decreased measurably as parties came to know each other. By the time you had spent significant time with someone, your choices in their presence were substantially predicted by all the choices that had come before. Not determined. Channeled. You had used your free will in a particular direction long enough that the direction had become structural.
Strangers did not have that problem.
On a Tuesday in February she takes the train to a neighborhood she never visits. She leaves her phone at home. She has nowhere to be and no one to report back to. She sits on a bench near a fountain and watches pigeons for a while.
The man who sits down has paint on his jacket in three colors. She does not know his name. He does not know hers. He looks at the fountain. She watches him looking at it.
She says: I've been trying to tell someone something for two weeks and no one I know wants to hear it.
The man thinks about this for a moment. He says: I'm listening.
She tells him. It takes four minutes. He is quiet throughout. When she finishes he says: what are you going to do?
She says: I don't know yet. And finds that she means it.
After a while he stands up, adjusts the jacket, and walks away. She watches him until he is gone. Then she sits for another few minutes looking at the fountain. Then she walks back to the train.