Important Strangers
A woman meets a stranger in a bookstore and stops her from stealing a book on how to cope with grief. After seeing the book, the speaker buys it and runs off to find the woman, who appeared homeless. A block or two away from the store, the two strangers connect and bond over the shared experience of a recent loss.
This short, seemingly ordinary, story is meaningful because I believe in chance encounters having purpose, despite appearing to be simply coincidental. Whether or not these encounters are simply just a coincidence, life is full of them and it would be a loss not to find some sort of meaning in them. The two strangers were able to disclose details of their losses because they had no emotional responsibility to each other and could feel the pain they had been hiding from their friends and family.
I really liked how the speaker told her story and thought that her voice
was powerful in encompassing the feelings of grief, strength, calmness, and
relief. These emotions were not explicitly explained and might not have been
picked up on if someone were to read this story instead of listening to her
voice. Audio stories like this one help provide the listener with more clues on
the speaker's emotions. For another example, in the Moth story "Real Men
don't rob banks" the speaker talks about his admiration for an unknown
criminal (before finding out that the criminal's identity is really that of his
father). From his voice, we can hear the magnitude of his admiration in a way
that provides more insight to his feelings than if we simply read the fact that
he admired him.
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