At one point, all of us were strangers. Classmates, best friends and lovers have all been brought together over potentially endless interests: niche hobbies, participation in extracurriculars or maybe just a shared class. For many of us, art bridges that gap. Whether it’s a favorite movie you rave about, a shirt from a specific tour that starts a conversation or a book you’ve been carrying around forever but haven’t finished yet, art can always help us start to understand people who used to be strangers.
In middle school, I used to play video games with a group of high schoolers from Grand Rapids. An internet connection that would have been unfathomable 25 years ago turned into a path for me to meet some of my best friends during middle and early high school, all because of our shared love for these games. In high school, I had the opportunity to visit them. Some could see it as a red flag or an instance “stranger danger,” but they weren’t strangers — we were best friends that just happened to live 500 miles apart. Without our shared love of games, we would have never bridged that gap, damned to be strangers forever.
The pieces written for this B-Side demonstrate how we bridge that gap, or why, sometimes, that gap was never meant to be bridged in the first place. In the Strangers B-Side, six Daily Arts Writers share their experiences with unfamiliarity, showcasing the good, the bad and the in-betweens of living with the unfamiliar.
Senior Arts Editor Nickolas Holcomb can be reached at nickholc@umich.edu.
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