I’ve always thought grocery stores are one of the most emotionally revealing public places.
People arrive there carrying entire invisible lives.
Exhausted parents buying cereal after soccer practice.
Older couples negotiating soup choices softly beside freezer doors.
College students calculating totals in their heads.
Workers still wearing uniforms at 9 p.m.
Even grocery carts themselves become little accidental biographies.
Energy drinks.
Frozen dinners.
Fresh herbs.
Birthday candles.
Cat food.
Cheap wine.
Organic or not strawberries.
I wonder if grocery stores are one of the few remaining places where ordinary life still fully reveals itself without much performance.
Nobody is curating an identity while deciding between paper towels.
People are simply trying to make another week of life function.
I find something strangely tender about that.
More soon.