He didn’t even share his name until the last moment. “I’m Zachary, by the way. Have a nice rest of your trip!” Happy smile, subtle wave and a pivot-turn in the opposite direction — gone, and probably for good.
I met Zachary in a two-location chain restaurant in San Juan during a spring break backpacking adventure. It was the last night of our trip and we were killing time before boarding our 3:35 a.m. red-eye to Washington. He posed to us the typical questions which had been flung at us throughout our time in Puerto Rico: Where are you from? What are you studying? Why are you here? What are you doing? Where are you going next?
But within those questions, he offered his own advice. “Don’t head straight to the airport,” he suggested, half-eaten hamburger in one hand. “A week from now you won’t wish you had that extra time waiting through security. Keep on exploring.”
We talked for no less than 20 minutes — no small feat for two strangers in a burger-and-fries joint — and thus, it was striking to me that I never caught his name until the end of the conversation. The same could be said by him of me, as I’m not sure he even got my name at all. Yet his outlook and perspective shone through in all he said and all he shared. He was a former Marine who had been living in San Juan for three years and was leaving for New York the next day. He was a man who lived in the moment and said what he thought, who believed in observing the surrounding world and never giving up a single moment.
Admittedly, there’s probably some romantic dramatization in the above statement. But that was the sense one got when talking with Zachary. It was fitting my trip ended with meeting him. After a week of staying in hostels and coming into contact with all kinds of kids — a pirate, a wrongly-fired former lifeguard, a wind walker, a law student and others — I had been spending a lot of time with some colorful characters. All of whom, despite affecting me in one prominent way or another, I will likely never meet again.
People spend a lot of time focusing on first impressions, perhaps because most of the people we value in life are those with whom we spend a lot of time. They’re the people we grow alongside, and thus their timeline with us is relatively indefinite. Our stories together have only a beginning, and no end.
But quick friends — those who start and end swiftly, not because of a lack of care but more due to a lack of time — have bookends. Time together starts with an unexpected meeting and ends with a brief goodbye.
There’s a cheesy old aphorism which says something about how good friends “leave footprints on our hearts” and “we are never, ever the same.” Of course, there’s validity in that. The people we surround ourselves with are those who inevitably shape us into the people we become, but that doesn’t mean the people with whom we spend just a little time are unimportant. Long-lasting friendships may help shape us into our future selves, but quick acquaintances offer up valuable, instantly-gratifying nuggets of wisdom.
During the same trip in which my friends and I met the aforementioned Zachary, we also got the chance to meet a whole host of other personalities. There was Brady, the unlikely attorney with a man-bun who, after five minutes of conversation, invited our group on a day-long adventure to an unknown island and proceeded to hide himself in a bar after shamelessly — though seriously — flirting with a waitress there. Edel, Lily and LuLu, who moved across the Atlantic to play field hockey at school, were traveling for the semester on a shoestring budget. Jack, along with his London pals, had quit his job and thrown his savings toward sailing around the Caribbean for a year. Middle-aged school teacher Gary of Dallas, Texas, had taken a so-called sabbatical and didn’t know when he was returning home. Marina from Switzerland wanted to perfect her English and Spanish and, to do so, was working in a hostel.
When we finally left the hostel after a three-night stay, we left early in the morning while most of the aforementioned acquaintances we had met while there were still sleeping, and we never got to say goodbye. It’s interesting, because while those were goodbyes which would actually have been legitimate — as we would likely never be seeing each other ever again — they weren’t goodbyes I felt were entirely necessary. We were all content in the brevity of our relationships and happy to leave the good times we had shared over the past 48 hours in memory only.
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