The Pedestrian Pathway

It’s funny how total strangers can just walk next to each other and even though they might walk together for more than one block, an uncomfortable silence becomes the mutual unspoken agreement between the two or three or as many strangers walking together. They might secretly glance at each other a couple of times just to visualize the stranger that walks next to the other. They might even mentally laugh or comment to the phone conversations that the other stranger may be doing. Then, at a certain point both strangers separate and maybe never see each other again. For a couple of blocks these strangers had at least one thing common, even though neither one was “brave” enough to say hi.

As the sun disappears on a beautiful Sunday a young man walks back to his apartment on 22^nd street. At the same time a beautiful (girl) college student is walking from 24th street to meet some friends at an apartment complex on 22^nd street. On the corner of 22^nd and San Antonio she turns west just as the young man steps on that corner, at this point both strangers are walking next to one another. Both strangers glance at each other and smile. For one whole block an uncomfortable silence ruled the walk. At the same time a third stranger, a young man heading towards campus, turns in the corner of Rio Grande and 22^nd street and starts walking east. At a certain place and point in time these three strangers will intersect and will have at least one thing in common. As the our first two mentioned characters walk together, the young man repeatedly glance at the beautiful college student that walks next to him, while the beautiful college student secretly glances no more than twice at the stranger that walks next to her. As these two strangers walk on the pedestrian path drawn on the intersection of Nueces and 2^nd street they intersect with our third character that walks in an opposite direction. As our third character glances at our female character, he makes eye contact and stops her in the middle of the pedestrian pathway to ask her “what time it is”, followed by asking for her name, followed by a couple of laughs, followed by an invitation for a cup of coffee; our first male character keeps walking. After being honked by some cars waiting to drive away, both characters exchange phone numbers and walk away. Our clever third character walked away with a phone number, while the other loser wasn’t able to even say hi. If our first character had spoken when he had a chance, he would have realized that our beautiful female character was actually heading to the same apartment complex as he was.