I decided to take the F train home today. It was past 7 pm; the last express bus leaving from Manhattan going to my neighborhood in Queens had long departed the East Side. Unfortunate, but I just finished working a 12-hour shift and did not have the faintest amount of energy in me to care about potential delays on the subway or impatiently waiting for and then taking the local bus home.

The F train comes quickly and luckily there are empty seats. I sit down and notice that the passenger next to me is wearing a gorgeous pair of black-white plaid pointy-toes shoes. Naturally, I give her a compliment, she smiles and says, “Thank you” and resign myself to sitting back quietly and eagerly awaiting reaching my stop.

But after five minutes of silence and getting lost in my thoughts, the woman next to me starts speaking. She tells me where she got her shoes and tells me how comfortable they are. So it begins. The small talk. My words start flowing, me agreeing to the how cute the shoes her, and she explaining how much she loves them. In the meanwhile, I fully start to take notice of her. She is sitting to my right, but is sitting with her body turned to the left, with her legs crossed, left arm serenely resting against the train seat and right arm softly resting against her body. She is wearing a blue blazer with red fitted pants. Her hair is pulled back into a bun with a big side waft of hair framing her face. Her glasses match her deep red pants and she is perfectly accessorized with a set of beaded bracelets and a small pin of the Virgin Mary. I try to place her accent; it sounds like she is from West Africa.

She talks to me with such a sense of familiarity and joy. Smiling from ear-to-ear and so comfortable sharing her takes on fashion with a stranger sitting on the train. Her warmth is so contagious and I immediately start to feel more relaxed and open and eager to continue the conversation. It quickly shifts to her telling me places she’d love to visit and explore around New York City. A burst of lightening shoots through me and wakes me up- exploring is my forte, the hobby that makes me feel like a global citizen and here was someone who liked the same thing as me? The excitement just swells inside me and my eagerness becomes all too childlike and apparent.

I immediately start sharing the websites I use to find interesting places such as Atlas Obscura or Untapped New York. She starts to take notes on her phone. I ask her where she lives and proceed to tell her about the historical and cultural places in her neighborhood to check out. Like a student, she takes everything in, jotting down notes and trying to search my suggestions every time the F train passed a station. She sees how enlivened I am by the conversation and shares her delight for history with me. I tell her that I have a deep-seated passion for archaeology and she even agrees with me that archaeology is such a fascinating subject. My little heart is just bursting with a joy! Even though I was the one primarily sharing the love for the field, it made me so thrilled to have someone show some interest, even the smallest bit, in archaeology. What started out as a reluctant train ride home turned into a feeling of camaraderie, a sense of belonging that made me feel a little less alone.

Us human beings are an interesting bunch; one small interaction can make or break our day. Nothing we said while on that train was revolutionary or extraordinary; we were just two women making small talk, getting to know each other with each passing stop. But the feeling that was borne from our conversation was nothing short of comfort and community for me. In all the years I have walked this Earth, I have never met another black person who was so interested in archaeology as much as I am. I have never met someone who was so interested in learning about the collective history of the world as much as I am. There is much pressure to act a certain way when you are part of a group, especially if you are a part of a marginalized community. And very often, it feels so limiting. It feels as if you are put into a box in which you cannot escape; your personality and interests defy the space people have forcibly put you in. But meeting this stranger and getting to gush over things that people consider corny gave me the energy boost to keep exploring the world and learning about our ancestors all over the planet and to never stop learning.

To the woman on the train: thank you for providing a community for me, no matter how small. Thank you displaying warmth and pleasantry that gets lost in the cracks in the streets of New York. Thank you for showing me that I do not have to be defined by my skin color; black people are allowed to have “corny” and nerdy “interests” and still be a valuable member of the black community. Thank you for your elegant and unique fashion sense! But most of all, most importantly, thank you for the irreplaceable, incomparable, and all-around desirable phenomenon that is human connection.

Check out these links for more ways to explore New York City: untappedcities.com

atlasobscura.com

secretnyc.co