You pass a man walking down aisle 5. He rushes, looking flustered. He bares an odd tattoo; it looks like some type of archaic, pictographic symbol. He’s desperately in need of a haircut and looks like he used to be morbidly obese, wearing a shirt that could fit three of him. He carries a bag with him. His cart is chock full of cans of dog food but he showed no signs of pet hair. He is a perfect stranger. You make nothing of it and go about your way, looking for some instantaneous soup. I get to wondering, what type of lives do others lead? All of these passers-by, they have stories—extraordinary lives, idiosyncrasies and pet peeves, jobs, preferences—and I feel they’re impossible to ignore. Everyday, I yearn for an opportunity to witness one of these lives. If given the chance, I’d analyze their intentions. I’d espouse their habits for a day. I’d get to know 1 of 7,022,695,420 people in the world.

Initially, your parents—not just mine—would tell you not to talk to strangers. Eventually, you began to wonder: How do I make friends? How did they make friends? Weren’t all the people I know strangers to me at one point? On this premise, I set out to learn about the intricacy of these relationships. I’d pick to spend a day with the first person that walked beside me on the street. You can learn a lot about a person by their reactions. You see if they mean well or not, you see their trickiness, their intelligence. I want to see exactly what’s going through one person’s head when they do things. This person will open the gateway to the human mind solely with whether they tell you you dropped your wallet or not. It would be like a case study.

Furthermore, spending a day with a stranger would allow me to adopt some habits for a day, maybe run by their schedule, too. I’d become this foreigner. I will become a nail-biter, a smoker, a hair twirler, or any other type of person with a sort of idiosyncrasy. As I theatre kid, I like getting into character and that’s what it would be for me; I’d be getting into my role as another person on Earth. I’d proceed by engaging in their everyday life. I’ll do laundry, cook, clean, and all sorts of other boring things that would appear to be magnified or glorified when done with someone you’ve hardly met (like the way you’re okay with helping your best friends clean their rooms but it’s a hassle to clean your own). Heck, I might not even have to do that, what with all the double lives people like leading nowadays. I met a guy who put on a mask and fought crime at night. Ol’ Average Joe is a trickster.

Finally, I’d simply get to know the person. Entertainer Will Rogers once said, “A stranger is just a friend I haven’t met yet.” A stranger is just a friend I haven’t met yet. Spending a day with someone new would be nice company. My best friend was a stranger to me once. Every person has an interesting story to tell, even if nothing goes on in their life. This is my definition of interesting: adj. 1. Anything that does not pertain to your everyday life. 2. Anything foreign. There are so many cancer survivors, war vets, bag boys, homeless people, kids to choose from. It’s insane how any one of these can offer some type of anecdote. And me, I’ve got 7,022,695,420 anecdotes to listen to.

The average person meets around 10,000 people in their entire life. This only counts people you’ve held more than a three-sentence conversation with. (I ended with a preposition there. Sorry.) Of those 10,000, you know maybe thirty-five of them well. There’s a huge difference between those two numbers. We’re all strangers to each other. We judge before knowing or, worse, we don’t judge at all. We ignore our fellow inhabitants. I want it to be different. I’ll spend a day with that chunky middle-aged woman carrying groceries home.