Chance Encounters #2: There Are No Strangers in NYC

The city smells like food and traffic. My feet shuffle as I ride the force of the crowd behind me making their way through the clogged pedestrian arteries of afternoon Manhattan. I’m here from Baltimore visiting my friend, Kandis.

She’s like my big sister, my inspiration and my hero all rolled into one. She’s in her sophomore year at Cooper Union, which is why I haven’t seen her in over a year. I have family in New York, and I’ve been here a million times, but being in the city with Kandis makes it new somehow. I never felt the electricity in the air here until I came with her.

We stop on the corner to buy rolling papers from a street vendor. I turn from the exchange of currency for utility, taking in more of the magick I’ve somehow missed up to now. The river of saturated street-fashion colors flow and meld in the midday sun. They become the rainbow of pigmentation, that is throngs of bodies bisected by shimmering glass and steel. All of this is coated with kaleidoscopic conversations and passions. I am at once a part of the mosaic and an individual spectator standing alone outside of it.

I am still reveling in my new awareness of the city as living art when another girl in her early twenties walks across the canvas of my periphery. She’s taller than me with skin that looks like it would probably tan rather than burn and rich chocolatey brown hair.

What is that? What is she eating? It looks like red jewels? In a small fuchsia bowl? My curiosity overtakes me, I’m not one to stop strangers midstride for a conversation; but I’ve never seen this before and may never see it again. Besides, she and I are figures on the same canvas, she won’t mind.

“Umm, hey! What is that? What are you eating?”

She looks at me with an embrace like expression, “It’s pomegranate! You've never seen a pomegranate before? You want to try it?”

“Really?” My heart is fluttering at the unexpectedly irresistible invitation, “Can I?”

“Of course!” She takes a scoop from the red skin, pressing her spoon into the white flesh of the fruit. Collecting a full scoop of the little red jelly looking jewels, she pushes it into my mouth which is already open from the shock of the moment.

“Here.” She says.

I chew and feel all the tiny, juicy, tart, little bursts of tingly sweetness fill my mouth. I can feel my eyes lighting up like a kid opening a present. She sees my delight and says, “It’s good, right?”

“Mmhm!” I nod like a bobble head.

The girl with the pomegranate is as delighted at I am at the exchange. Her face is alight like a flutter of butterflies larking in a field of wildflowers. Her warm eyes wish me good-bye as she folds herself back into the multitude.

Kandis turns back to me rolling papers in hand, “You ready?”

I tell her about my adventure. As I follow her facial expression through my retelling, I fear I’ve failed to capture the spectacular nature of the events. When my story finishes, she smiles a knowing smile. I realize that I have just gotten a taste of what she experiences every day in the city.

“I’m so glad you could finally come and visit,” she says.

I answer her in kind, feeling our relationship reach a new depth of understanding. I let my mind swim through the new unspoken known between us. I smile inside and out.

Kandis and I walk back to her apartment to smoke but I know it will be wasted on me. I’m already lifted.

Krystena Lee is the author of the children’s book series Memory Verse Kids™ as well Ears to Hear, a paranormal fiction novel, that follows 12 year old boy as he begins to hear a strange voice. Her fiction pulls back the curtain on the unseen and makes the unknowable known. She also writes articles on faith, family and finding work. Her freelance writing services can be procured for writing resumés, cover letters, bios and all things SEO & copy writing.