A cashier whom I do not know gave me a free refill of coffee this morning. It was Strange, but it made me feel more welcome and comfortable occupying the space I've claimed in the corner of this café.

For balance (and not lack of gratitude,) I'll write about discomfort with the strange. In this case, the kind you feel sympathetically when you watch someone behave with so little social awareness that your skin crawls. When you have to sit on your hands and bite your tongue until it bleeds. "I would NEVER..."

There is a woman who comes to the coffee shop around the same time I do who causes me such discomfort. To say nothing of the quality of her clothing, she appears to have dressed haphazardly, and does not appear to drive a car. Over the course of her visit she darts in and out the doors, starting conversations with herself, customers, baristas, gesticulating wildly in a frantic sign language that appears to have devolved from ASL. Her lips smile, but her eyes reflect pain.

Baristas know her by now, and understand she's harmless. Some customers humor her, but some are visibly and audibly uncomfortable with how close she stands to them. Even I, sitting in my corner at a safe distance, am disquieted by the constant bobbing of her head and body and the frenetic flitting fingers in front of her face as she speaks. I cringe and squeeze my eyes shut when she tries to communicate with children who appear more fearful of her than anything else.

Her short-circuited language reflects what I can only imagine to be a past life. A life when she drew a bridge between herself and a community of people who cannot use the same channels of aural communication that most humans do. Practically living on a different plane of existence. 

She appears to be desperately toeing the seam between our plane and hers. It moves me to see people on the "normal" plane making efforts to communicate with her, to steady her tightrope walk. It checks the privilege of the judgmental little dragon in my heart that would singe her for being uncouth, and stirs the dragon who would breath just enough flame to warm and dry her as she walks uncovered back to her home on this rainy morning.

Beneath the worn exterior of her psyche, however, is something beautiful and kind. In ages past she might have been ostracized and labeled by the fearful as mad or possessed by some evil; in this coffee shop, most can see she is a human who has known irreversible suffering, who would seek only to improve the lives of others given the opportunity to shed her malady.

----Spoiler Alert if you haven't seen Stranger Things (though this really doesn't give much away)----

This woman appears particularly benign next to the otherworldly monster depicted in Stranger Things. Through a timely coincidence(?), that series parallels our reality. A creature from another reality has visited himself upon our world, snatching people and dragging them into its own terrifying dimension. Its mindless actions drive a wedge between those in our dimenson who can believe that such a monster exists and those who cannot--or will not--acknowledge the monstrous nature of its presence.

Only those who can acknowledge the monster can fight it. In Stranger Things, only those with purity of intention and willingness to question reality find themselves capable of gaining any ground. The children at the center of the story have the most flexible concept of possibility and are the most effective defenders of their world.

If only they existed outside of Stranger Things' fiction. A very real monster, a manifestation of the collective, unconscious fear and anger plaguing millions, blights not only our country but many others. This blight has proven capable of turning people against each other for their attachments to one version of reality or the other. 

In this moment of human history, as in Stranger Things, heroism seems to require the ability to walk along the seams and leap across the rifts; would-be-heroes will face down discomfort with the strange and unfathomable with a determination to rescue what is "good."