For me, it was a long talk I had with a random person on Omegle when that was a thing. I was bored one night so I decided to give it a try and I was matched with someone who I had nearly a 2 hour conversation with. We told jokes, told each other about ourselves, and talked like we were lifelong friends. But, we never did tell each other our names. I could’ve talked to this person all night but the interaction turned for the worst near the end. The person was depressed from what I gathered and the depression arose and the conversation fizzled out. I still think about them nearly 6 years later and hope that they are doing good whoever they were.
Sitting in my work van at a red light i spot a woman approximately 150ft away exiting an office building through a revolving glass door. She’s pushing the door when it comes to a sudden stop. Confused she gives it a forceful push before realizing an elderly woman was trying to enter the same door and had become stuck half in half out and that why the wasn’t spinning. With an embarrassed look on her face our eyes lock and we both start laughing. Our interaction was wordless and brief but I still remember it after 30 years
I was just picking up food at a gas station and had a woman stair me in the eyes and ask me if I believed in god. I thought she may have been setting up for a joke about the touch screen, but when she just asked again and I silently walked away. She then moved onto another person and I waited for my food to be finished outside. When I came back in, she had cornered an employee. There was a trump rally outside, so I do believe that she was more likely to have been an evangelical over something else.
This is a great question!
When I was like 17, I was driving (the speed limit, no music playing) through my friend’s neighborhood when I passed a woman out grabbing her mail. I gave a little wave and smiled, and she looked at me like I had just punted a fucking infant.
I felt so offended, and I’ve never forgotten that look on her face- I would love to know what her perspective on this is/was.
I’m just sitting here refreshing this thread waiting for more stories, so I’m gonna share another one.
I was talking to a black man with the most gorgeous blue eyes. I complimented him on his eyes, and he asked, genuinely, “you know how I got blue eyes?”, and there’s really only 3 options- 2 mixed parents, or 1 white and 1 mixed, so I took a stab at it and said “you got a white dad?” This man’s eyes went WIDE like I was a damn witch. He got real serious and asked “how’d you know that??” I told him I just guessed, but it was clear he didn’t believe me as he scratched his chin and put some distance between us
/#3
When I was about 7/8yrs old, I ended up in an elevator alone with an elderly couple who proceeded to debate with one another whether I was a boy or a girl, while making direct eye contact with me.
The woman argued I must be a girl because of my pretty hair and face, while her husband was sure I must be a boy, given my… outfit and eyebrows? They never bothered to asked me, and I exited the elevator without saying a word to them
Sooo… have you decided yet, which one you want to be?
I settled for nonbinary actually lol
Honestly, that was the option I had hoped for when I made that joke. I‘m happy for you.
Just as an FYI don’t need any white in there to have eye colors other than brown. Just increases the likelihood.
True, that’s how blue eyes became a thing in the first place, I imagine lol
My interaction was WAAAY different but the same vein.
I was driving around, biting the backside of my fingernail. I turned a corner, and this gorgeous girl driving, waved, and smiled at me for no reason.
I was like, hot damn I still got it. Then, I realized biting the back of my nail, palm facing out, probably looked like I was waving at her.
To this day I don’t know why it stuck with me.
Awe, that’s cute! For her to smile and wave back though you must be fairly attractive yourself, even if she didn’t do so unprompted!
My primary hypothesis is the woman somehow thought I flipped her off. Imagining a stranger smiling at me and showing me their middle finger, I might have a similar reaction lol
when i was young, i was in a bad car accident where i had a head injury. someone stopped and held a shirt against my head and held my hand till the ambulance got there. I’ll never meet them, but I’ll never forget it.
You might be able to get their name from the accident’s police report.
I used to live in downtown Oakland, notoriously not the safest city. I was stumbling home from a night of drinking around 3am one morning, and this guy on a bike rolled up on me out of nowhere and he just goes “hey man, you scared of black people?” He was an older black man that appeared to be disheveled and possibly living on the street, and I legit just laughed and was like, no, I grew up in a city, and I live here, so no, not at all haha. And he just goes, “Alright. You have a good night.” and he rode off.
Like 5 years later, I’m waiting for my bus one morning to go to work, and the exact same thing happens. Rolls up on a bike and asks me if I’m scared of black people. Again, I say no, kind of being like dude leave me alone not this again, and he replies “I know you’re not. I remember you. Have a great morning.” He shook my hand and rolled off, never saw him again. Just such an odd experience haha.
Reminds me of a time I was sitting outside enjoying my high, staring out into the night. Suddenly, a smile appeared directly in my gaze, floating in the darkness- I squinted and noticed the smile belonged to a black man looking back at me, who said “couldn’t see me til I smiled, huh?”
Time traveler making sure his changes stuck.
The other timeline is… not so good.
There was the old bar fly at the pub I drank at when I was an alcoholic, he was a Vietnam war vet that was one of the people that got sprayed with agent orange, he got lucky that he didn’t have any real health issues and his kids were fine, he would just tell me stories about his life and the many jobs he had, was just a cool old dude who was enjoying his final years. Every time I hear the song the Gambler I get reminded of him. RIP Shorty, you little old nutjob.
Slow day at work, called a Dell support rep to deal with some equipment that needed to be replaced and ended up talking with them for 2 hrs. I think they must’ve been bored too because I remember telling them directly that we could end the call or keep talking if they wanted. They not only were comfortable with it but said they’ve never just chatted with someone.
Same idea as OP, it was like catching up with an old friend.
I was in Nashville for a business trip, and I was trying to figure out where I could get a pack of smokes. I see an old security guard smoking, so I figure he might have an idea. He ended up giving me and my wife a smoke to “hold us over till then”, and then started talking about the yearly foods, and how Magic Johnson bought this building and how he got his unusual name. ( Which is honest to God on his birth certificate)
I will never forget you, Tiny.
I grew up in Honolulu, and every once in a while there would be a tsunami warning. I don’t know how old I was—I would guess 6 years old, give or take a couple of years—but during one tsunami warning my parents drove up a ridge and parked on the side of the road to wait it out. We had a VW Vanagon, and I remember sitting in the van playing with toys to pass the time. At some point, a girl around my age joined me in the van. Her parents had the same idea as mine, and I guess they invited her to play with me while we all waited.
I’m in my 40s now. I still think about that girl from time to time.
A day or three after Hurricane Ivan finds me (white), my two roommates (white and Taiwanese) and a stranger (black) from around the corner playing cards on the porch. No power or water, it was all we had to do.
Black guy keeps getting us white guys mixed up. He gets our names wrong again and the other white guy says, “I’m John, he’s Jules.”
This guy is stumbling over himself apologizing and I cut him off, “It’s all good! I know we white people all look alike to y’all.”
An intense 2.54 seconds follows while everyone looks around the table to see if it’s OK to laugh. Then we just started howling. Whew.
I met a somewhat old man on a Greyhound a few years ago who was pretty delirious and drifting in and out of sleep. Turns out he had been traveling non-stop for three days, heading from Georgia to his home in Oakland. He had been on a roadtrip with his friends in (what he described as) a cursed Mitsubishi which broke down a final time some 2500 miles from home. All his friends took flights back, but our protagonist did not bring any kind of ID with him and couldn’t take a plane. So there he was, having not slept much at all in 3 days, on the i-10 between Tucson and Phoenix.
He also borrowed my phone to call his wife, who it seemed had not sanctioned his roadtrip at all and was very mad at him. She eventually hung up on him. Handing my phone back to me, he assured me that she wouldn’t stay mad at him after seeing his baby-blue eyes upon his arrival in Oakland.I don’t remember so many of the details, but hearing this guy’s life story and about his impulsive cross-country roadtrip was kinda strangely inspiring.
I was in Japan with my Fiance pre-covid and we were traveling from Ueno to Harajuku. It was early-ish morning and the train was pretty full by the time this woman who seemed to be in the elder age range was standing in front of me. Where I come from it’s just polite to offer your seat to people who are older, so I did just that. For context, I speak enough Japanese to maybe converse with a 5 year old. We had a little exchange that went kind of like, “please take my seat” -> “oh no, I couldn’t” -> “I’m getting off soon” … that eventually ended with us sitting next to each other.
She was surprised to learn that I didn’t speak Japanese fluently after I felt like I was struggling through a few simple conversations about the weather. And I wish I could remember what she said, but it ended up with her saying something like it’s ok because we understand each other, “hearto to hearto”. And she placed her hands over her heart and then over mine. Goddamn, that was the most anime moment in my life and nothing is going to live up to that memory.
I was biking near campus in a bike lane and an old truck matched my speed (maybe 15mph) and then the truck came into my lane a little so I slapped the side to make noise. The passenger was a girl and her window was down so I yelled something and she looked back at me a face that I can only describe as “I don’t want to be here” but then she looked forward again and I noticed the driver was looking over his shoulder at me with a big smile. Anyway, he forced me off the side of the road and I rolled to a stop in some grass and was totally fine, just shocked that someone would do something so reckless. He easily could have bumped me and I could have ended up under a tire. The truck then shot off (in a 25 zone).
My mom adopting me.
If you don’t mind sharing, I would love to hear your memories of that.
My earliest memory is from when I was five because my memory isn’t very reliable, but I can tell you a bit of what happened before that based on the things I was told.
There was some kind of medical condition that would run in my family. My birth parents, which included my mom who was in her 20’s and my dad who was in his 60’s, met because they were nuclear testing refugees and settled in a separate territory. They wanted kids but every time they’d have one, they’d notice the medical condition (which is said to be what later manifested in me in another way) take hold and got paranoid and probably had all seven of us because of that out of fear that too few would mean everyone would succumb to it, me being the youngest of seven sisters, a trait my birth mother also had. After me, they succumbed to the (still unclear) medical condition, it was some seemingly uncharted strand of the Epstein-Barr virus and it would manifest similar to the sleeping sickness. They’re didn’t die, just became not responsive to everyday contact.
There were different circumstances surrounding me and my sisters, so while I was adopted by a single adoptive mother, who is the foster sister of my birth grandfather (she actually wasn’t even from the same culture so it counted as an interracial adoption) and took advantage of his unisex name to rename me after him (many people don’t get the unisex memo though, they hear my name and wrongly automatically think “male”), they were adopted by a single adoptive father who then married my adoptive mother, making them my step-sisters as well (the reason I have one last name and they have others), something I’m simultaneously super grateful for as well as regret feeling distanced due to. We then moved to the US because there were no schools in the area in the Pacific where we were and because the same grandfather (whose home I inherited two years ago and who I had the biggest bond with) lived there.
Probably my earliest memory of interacting with someone outside my family was when I was in an Easter egg hunt and being a little kid somehow managed to drop all my eggs. Another kid stopped what he was doing to help me pick them up. I don’t know why but that stuck in my head and I think it’s influenced how I’ve treated people throughout my life.
