Friends, I must be honest with you; the world is really pressing down on me right now. Cathy is going through another period of debilitating fatigue, and I’m doing my best to care for her while also attending to everything that needs attention around the house—things like cooking and cleaning and all those other adult things that Cathy usually helps manage. On top of all that, we now have a sick cat to worry about. Many of you know our orange tabby, Stella. Last night she hunkered down under a cedar chest and wouldn’t come out. She even growled at me when I reached under the chest and tried to pet her, which was contrary to her very sweet disposition. I know I’ll need to take her to the vet in the morning.

This is all to say this blog has been barely in my thoughts. At first, I thought I wouldn’t even try to make a post this week. Then, I thought of a story I can tell.

A few days ago, carrying a load of depression and anxiety, I made a trip to the grocery store. At the checkout line, the clerk, an older woman (by that, I mean a woman around my age), asked how I was doing.

“Fine, thank you,” I said.

“You don’t sound very convincing,” she said.

There are times when the world presses down so hard, I want someone to hear my story. At these times, I find myself incapable of lying for the purpose of chit-chat. I could have easily said something innocuous—something deflective like, “It’s really raining out there.” I couldn’t bring myself to do it.

“My wife is undergoing cancer treatments,” I said.

I knew I was breaking an unspoken social contract that dictated, “Thou shall not speak to a stranger of anything that matters,” but at the time, I was hurting too much to care.

The clerk stopped scanning my items. I could tell I’d shocked her with too much truth, and she didn’t know how to respond.

Finally, she said, “I’d rather have cancer than Alzheimer’s.” Now, I was the one who didn’t know what to say. She went on to support her statement, but what she said was equally astonishing, something about Alzheimer’s coming on suddenly while cancer can exist for a while before discovery. The suspect logic of her statement escapes me, but still, I want to be fair to her. I know I’d put her in an uncomfortable situation. What does one say when a stranger invites you into their difficult life?

That’s the question I want to leave you with, this question of what can happen when strangers break down the boundaries between them. You might want to try it in your writing. You might even be working with characters who have known each other a long time. What truth does one character expose to another? How does that other character respond?

In my case, I ignored the clerk’s comment about preferring cancer to Alzheimer’s, and she went back to scanning my items. I left, thanking her when she said, “I’ll be praying for your wife.” The clerk went back to her business—she had another customer’s items to scan—and I went out into the rain, back to Cathy and Stella and our other cat, Stanley, who, despite how imperfect I am, rely on me.

I don’t know whether the grocery clerk thought of me later that day, as I have her. We were two strangers, but for a time, we were extraordinary. Isn’t that what we want for all our characters? Dialogue can take us to these remarkable moments if we’ll let one character say what they’ve been aching to say and if we allow another character to respond in kind.