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International Bizarre
{Author’s Note: I thought I knew who she was before we ever met. Turns out, the story I’d written about a stranger revealed far more about me than it did about her.}
I sold something on Facebook Marketplace.
My dearly departed Toyota Camry’s floor mats.
I still miss that car.
I didn’t get rid of her because I wanted to.
Circumstances made the decision for me.
Selling the floor mats felt strangely final, like admitting she wasn’t coming back.
I’d already signed her over to the body shop, but somehow this felt more permanent.
A woman messaged me about them a week ago.
She asked if I’d take less.
I told her to wait.
A week later, I accepted her offer anyway.
I even knocked another five dollars off.
We’d exchanged a handful of messages by then.
She seemed nice.
She mentioned her kids.
We talked briefly about plants.
About how hard it is to kill pothos.
About how reliable Toyota Camrys are.
While I waited for her to arrive, curiosity got the better of me.
I clicked on her Facebook profile.
I wanted to know if she was around my age.
I don’t know why.
Maybe I was imagining we’d have more in common than a set of used floor mats.
Maybe we’d become unexpected friends.
Then I saw something that immediately changed the story I’d been telling myself.
Donald Trump and Melania were smiling back at me from her cover photo.
I nervously laughed.
Then I almost immediately texted my best friend.
She joked that I should charge her more.
I laughed. Again.
For a moment, it all felt justified.
Somewhere between rinsing a plate and waiting for her to pull into the driveway, it hit me.
I was doing exactly what I claim to hate.
I’d already decided who she was.
Not because of anything she’d said to me.
Not because she’d been rude.
Not because she’d treated me poorly.
Because of a picture.
When she got here, she was exactly who she’d been over Messenger.
Friendly.
Grateful.
Easy to talk to.
She thanked me twice for giving her the discount.
Then she handed me a cup full of plant cuttings she’d brought for me to propagate.
I hadn’t even asked.
The woman I’d been messaging liked plants.
She drove a Camry.
She was a mom.
She was generous.
The only thing I actually knew about her was that we disagreed politically.
Everything else I had invented.
That realization made me uncomfortable.
It’s easy to believe we’re the compassionate ones.
The accepting ones.
The ones who see people as individuals.
It’s much harder to notice when we’ve quietly started sorting strangers into categories of our own.
I’m new to Christianity, and one of the things I’ve been thinking about lately is the way Jesus loved people before asking them to change.
Before deciding whether they deserved it.
Before determining whether they agreed with Him.
I still disagree with her politics.
That didn’t change.
What changed was realizing I’d turned her into an idea before I’d allowed her to remain a person.
She drove away with my old Camry floor mats.
I walked back inside twenty-five dollars richer, carrying a cup full of plant cuttings.
Funny how quickly we reduce people to symbols.
Meanwhile, they’re handing us something worth growing.
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