i met him: the traveler

I met him in the dressing room.

“What do you think of this one?” a thick accent spoke into my space, clouding my concentration. 

Annoyed, I looked up. Less annoyed after seeing his smile, I looked him up and down. 

“Honestly, I think it’s your color.”

“It does bring out my eyes right?”

I laughed, for the first time that day.

I was working a job I hated in a city that seemed to hate me. At the entrance of the dressing room every day, people made it clear that to them, I was just a big, annoying clothes rack standing in between them and their chance to look at themselves in a full sized mirror.

And now here was this broad shouldered, green-eyed stranger asking my honest-to-God opinion about whether or not those cargo pants made his butt look big. It wasn’t just refreshing, it was exhilarating. 

He stood by my dressing room station for over an hour, telling me about the place he was from, the place’s he’d been and the places he wanted to go. He was a true adventurer and the most genuine hippy I had ever met. 

And when we met for tea the next day, to swap adventure stories and tear off little pieces of ourselves and hide them in each other’s pockets, I decided that this might be one of the purest souls I had ever encountered. Every time his long hair fell in his eyes as he was listening to me tell a story, he’d push it back quietly and quickly. And maybe I’m just silly, but somehow I got the notion he was always pushing his hair back because he was honestly interested in seeing me tell my stories.

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