Human connection

Strangers, and what passes between people who will never learn each other's names.

• Somewhere, a stranger is still thinking about you

  What it means to be held in someone's mind by a person who will never learn your name, and whose name you will never learn either.

• The things you can only tell someone who does not know you

  Why people confess to taxi drivers and hairdressers, and why anonymity sometimes permits more honesty than being loved does.

• One line from a stranger, three days later

  You read a hundred and forget ninety-nine. Then one arrives at the wrong moment and follows you around for a week. On why certain ones lodge.

• The relief of finding out you are not the only one

  Discovering someone else has felt exactly what you feel changes nothing about your situation, and helps anyway. Here is what it is actually doing.

• Carved initials and other letters to nobody in particular

  Marginalia, bench plaques, names cut into wet concrete. People have always left words for readers they will never meet, and the habit is older than any medium for it.

• One sentence is enough to care about someone

  You can know almost nothing about a person and still want things to go well for them. That should be stranger than it is.