During the deepest parts of COVID lockdowns, there was one thing I was surprised to find myself missing: strangers.
To be more specific, those everyday exchanges we have with strangers that act as tiny points of human connection throughout our day.
Things like bonding with someone on the tram because of a shared footy team or bearing witness to something funny that you both just happened to be in the same place at the same time for.
Smiling at babies in prams. Patting a cute dog that doesn't belong to you.
While I missed my family, I spoke to them all the time — but those moments with strangers, where you're never sure where the conversation will lead or what connection you could make, were an unexpected gap in my daily life that I didn't know I ached for.
A day full of tiny human moments
At the start of this year, I took a huge pivot away from my WFH desk and opened up a cafe with my sister.
I had done a lot of bartending in my younger days, so hospitality was already in my wheelhouse. But a cafe? It was brand new to me.
Here, I've found myself in a place where now my entire day is made up with these tiny human moments — and it's something I didn't expect to love about my new venture.
Coffee is a habit — for some people, a multiple-times-per-day habit — and so, unlike restaurants or bars, in our cafe there are people we see and speak to more frequently than our closest friends. And in a weird way, they start to feel like our friends.
We think about them often, worry when they don't come into the shop, talk about them between ourselves like they're part of our daily circle — because in a way, they are.
Joyful and heartbreaking
Along the way, there have been a surprising number of moments of human connection that I never could have anticipated.
One joyful one has been watching one of our regulars progress from "are they pregnant?" to "yes, they're definitely pregnant", to seeing them come in pushing a pram, a brand new person in our midst.
Some have been heartbreaking.
One morning, the shop was quiet, and a woman came in to order a coffee. Before getting through the coffee order, her breathing became hitched and tears flowed down her face.
"My husband just died," she said, "and he used to make my coffee for me."
In an instant, we weren't just two strangers, we were two people in a moment charged with so much pure human emotion and grief, I don't think I will ever forget it. I hugged this stranger because now she was more to me than that.
The world's slowest speed date
Some relationships with our regulars aren't filled with birth and death, but rather a slow building of a quasi-friendship, each interaction unearthing a little more information and understanding about the other.
Where they're from, what they do for work, who they live with. It's like the world's slowest speed date.
My favourite moments are when we manage to connect two customers that we didn't realise were connected.
We've served couples separately for months, building up a rapport with each, before one day seeing the two of them come in together — forcing us to re-examine every interaction we've had with them both in the months before.
In these moments, we feel like detectives, piecing together the clues from conversations prior that should have helped us work it out.
Some locals have even met because of our cafe, crossing paths frequently on their similar schedules, and in these moments I get to see strangers have moments of connection of their own.
There is much to get used to in this new cafe life: the early wake-ups, the long days on my feet, the overdosing on coffee when it's within arm's reach.
But the most unexpected pleasure, the most rewarding, the most joyful, is those daily interactions with people of all ages, backgrounds and levels of extroversion, who remind me that a stranger is just someone you haven't met yet.
Chryssie Swarbrick is a writer from Melbourne/Naarm.
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