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A small Conversation
By lili dauphin   


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Small Conversation is the story of two strangers who met on a hiking trail. Once they started talking, they realized that they had shared experiences, thus enabling them to find comfort in each other.

A SMALL CONVERSATION


It was a beautiful day. It was so clear that I felt as though I could touch the sky. It had rained the night before, therefore the air smelled clean and fresh. Everybody was on the trail enjoying the beautiful blue sky. I was with my beautiful dog Tinula enjoying that beautiful Saturday afternoon with her. As we walked up our favorite trail, we could smell the barbecues simmering on their individual stoves. Tinula stopped for awhile, looked straight into one of those barbecues to savor the smell, hoping that someone might even let her have a bone or a piece of meat, but no such luck. Instead she decided to chase the squirrels which have become her favorite past-time. She was not as fast as she once was; lately she has not been feeling so well, and further, old age was catching up with her, thus taking with it the luxury of chasing other animals.
While we continued climbing, I met a woman on the trail; she was very beautiful with long beautiful straight dark hair and dark eyes. She was tall, and looked very distinctive. She did not look like a typical hiker. She did not dress like a hiker. She dressed as if she were ready to go to a cocktail party more than hiking some muddy trails in a park. She nearly ran me over while trying to escape from a little dog who could not have weighed more than fifteen pounds. The little dog seemed to belong to one of the young men coming down on the trail. The little dog was yipping and yapping and when I yelled, “Watch out for the mountain lion” she could not help but stop and burst into laughter. The dog persisted in barking away, its attention off the laughing woman now and onto a dog twenty times its size: a Napoleonic creature indeed. We watched as the little dog capered around a bemused Doberman Pincer; whose owner seemed to be elsewhere in his head.
Presently the owner of the tiny dog appeared and with a scowl walked off with the raging animal into the blur of mountain paths. I noticed a change in the woman’s demeanor. Her laughter became different; more urgent but it was nothing so lighthearted as before.
“I’m dying inside,” she said suddenly in a thick French accent, “and I don’t know what to do.”
“Why are you feeling this way?” I asked her; now realizing there was going to be unexpected gravity to my mountain journey.
“Someone broke my heart in two,” she sobbed, her hand wiping away a tiny tear.
“You will be fine,” I told her; (rather unconvincingly at first)
“No I won’t!” she fired back, “and I’ll never trust anyone again!”
` “You will,” I insisted; but my words would not break through.
She paused, her hand pressed over her heart as though to check that it was still beating. She told me a man had betrayed her. His name was Larry; she had met him six years ago in the college that she had attended. It was love at first sight. They dated for two years before they were married. She went back to her country to visit her dying mother. She got back home a day earlier only to find him in their bed with another woman. Afterwards her life had spun out of control. I listened to her for what seemed like hours, days, although she never volunteered her name and I never asked for it. We were simply two strangers standing in the woods; her sobs echoing through the sprawling thicket. We were there and we understood.
“Have you ever had a broken heart?” she asked me, a twinge of searching hope in her voice. I nodded yes. At this I watched her shoulders lower very slightly; her frame decompress. I knew she expected me to tell her a little bit about my own betrayal. I didn’t want to tell her too much. I hoped to at least share a little bit of my own experience with her, hoping that she would then feel better about her own situation.
“Yes, I have been betrayed; we were together for a long time; he was my first love and I loved him more than anything in the world, I thought that I was the only one, but I was naive.”
“Why do they have to lie to us so much?” she asked.
“I don’t know; I don’t have the answer.”
“Do you think there is such thing as good men?” She asked.
“Yes, I believe so,” I answered.
“I would love to believe though, but I don’t think that I can right now.”
“You will someday, you just need to heal.” I said to her.
“You think I can ever heal”? She asked.
“Of course, you will and you can.”
We were indeed two of a kind; passersby in the forest, citizens of a human landscape so much larger than ourselves.
“It’s so hard, isn’t it?” she said, “what can we do?”
I suggested we keep walking. She nodded grudgingly, and off onto the path we went while she gave me more details of her broken love affair, more than I needed to know, they were rather too graphic for my sensitive ears.
I had been watching her the whole time she was crying. Her jeans were impeccable; her blouse of the finest silk. She had money; she had shelter. She had her health. She had food to eat when so many around her simply did not. When she had exhausted her sobbing I remarked all of these things. I told her of the men who sleep on rotting comforters on a boulevard not so far away; of people in other countries with no access to medicine; of people in our own lands without food to eat. There was a sharp change in her disposition; her eyes seemed to dry on the spot. Although her heart was still broken and surely it takes more than words to mend a broken heart she had felt some sense of perspective from my words. I told her that we are all human beings; strong, resilient, capable of loving again and finding love in the strangest of places. She would love again. She would trust again.
She smiled. She said, “Why didn’t someone tell me that before?”
By then we had reached the end of the trail. She gave me a hug, said thanks, and then walked off to her car. She turned the ignition and was gone. I never got her name.
I got in my car along with my beautiful dog and stared straight ahead at the wind-waving palms whose fronds seemed to be kissing each other. I had found a soul in the woods; someone who needed comfort and I had given it to her. There is no substitute for shared experience. We all need other human beings.
I have not been on that trail in awhile. It belongs to an anonymous encounter; one that has no name and needs no name. It belongs to a world of fate; of intimacy. I do wonder sometimes what has become of her; and I’m sure every now and then she wonders the same about me.
I may not have healed her completely for that, Time can do more than words, but that morning I brought a smile to the face of the brokenhearted. And they can’t take that away from me.






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