A stranger is healing me and it was always that way. I remember being healed by a stranger for the first time. Alone on my bike in a street by my house, I met a Jewish girl - Hannah. I was eight and she was a little older.
I would cycle to her house by the conifers which lined the cricket pitch. She never went beyond the turn at the end of her road, so I came all the way to see her strange haircut and her knees and shoes on the peddles. She was sure of herself. She spoke about a world she lived in that I didn't know about. She wasn't superior, it wasn't a better world, it was just different in every conceivable aspect. I understood that she was carrying something and giving it to me in little pieces. I was holding pieces for her and she liked it too. We would meet and talk on the bikes without looking at each other directly. I was minding the patterns of her life, the places she went to, the word Mezuzah, which she spoke after she pointed at a little silver box stuck to her doorframe.
I had seen men with black coats and curls falling down by their ears walking up and down the main road and I understood they were from her family. Hannah, to me, was a door unlocking which my family, my parents, my school, could not open, because they only spoke about difference, but they were in fact, the same as me because they were mine. The healing that comes with the attention of a stranger is like standing in a waterfall after being thirsty and dirty and hot. I learnt to see the world magically with Hannah for a few weeks.
One day I waited and she didn't come. I stayed under the trees, until finally, head down, no bike, she slipped out to say her dad wouldn’t let her talk to me. She said that I asked too many questions. She said these words in her father's voice, but we both believed them, because what we had been doing seemed too exciting to be allowed. In the shame and shock I said nothing. I turned and cycled and cried and never went back.
I know now that she been healing me, that something in the opening-up of strangers and the click, click, swish of the door opening, of the world becoming known, of her father, the strange man, and her awkwardness on her bike becoming things I would defend as the possessions of my friend, these things make me feel complete.
Breaking separateness - this a deep pleasure. I felt a feeling which became linked, later in my life, to something erotic. I didn't want reach Hannah like this, I was a child, but it is a feeling which is now also present when I share my body, it is the excitement of the spirit when it is revealed and recognised. Hannah and I had done that.
I still cycle to the conifers, to speak with a strangers. Witnessing their world heals me. I can be hit by a wave of fear that someone is lurking behind a door and will take this thing from me again. That I am bad, that I am incapable of holding the gold of someone's life without trying to slip it into my pocket. But this is never what I was attempting.
I can stand at the door to an unknown place. I can be still, vibrant, alive, loving, ready to be filled, overflowing with love. Hannah and I were snuffed out by her father's fear, but I have learnt to recognise that, and so in some way, I have changed the world.
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