passing through

We meet strangers everyday.
In fact, most of the people in our lives, our friends, our colleagues, our spouses, were at some point strangers to us.
Sometimes you can share a lot more with a complete stranger than with people you've known your whole life. The girl who meets a guy in a bar and ends up in his bed an hour later, shares her body in complete intimacy with a total stranger. She might never see him again, and yet for a glimpse of time, they were as close as two people can physically get. The surgeon who has the life of a patient in his hands, actually touches his heart and makes it beat again, giving him life back. The woman who was meeting my father for a business lunch when he suddenly had a heart attack, and who drove him to the emergency room --saving his life. The volunteer worker at a makeshift hospital in a disaster area, who holds the hand of a stranger who only has a few minutes to live, witnessing his last breath. These bonds that are created in the lapse of seconds, minutes or hours, are sometimes stronger than those we spend years weaving.
And it works backwards too. A husband wakes up one day and tells his wife "Next week will be twenty-five years since we were married. I told you we would be together 25 years, and we were. Now I want a divorce." True story.
Imagine spending more than half your life with someone, and then in a split second having them walk away. In that second, the husband went from the closest person she had to a complete stranger.
I knew a person not so long ago. He was my partner, my best-friend, and I knew everything about him. We had our fair share of hardship when we were together, and we saw each other in the most vulnerable of situations. And then things crashed, the way they do sooner or later. And now he's a stranger. I know nothing about him, and the truth is, I don't care to know. This person I saw every day for years, I haven't bumped into in months. And if I did, I wouldn't even know how to say hello. How do you say hello to a stranger?
But they say people come into your life for a reason, a season, or a lifetime. And whether they were in your life for a day or for a decade, many a times, they will remain strangers. Because on the large scale of things, a few seconds or a few years can have the same effect.
And at the end of the day, I guess we're all just passing through.