What We Owe the Stranger

On borders, bread, and the slow murder of solidarity

What have we agreed to forget?

There is a question I cannot stop asking myself. It lives in my chest like a stone I swallowed years ago and never passed.

It surfaces when I am brushing my teeth, when I am waiting for the kettle to boil, when I am lying in bed listening to the rain against the window of my flat in a country that is not mine but has allowed me in.

The question is this: What have we agreed to forget?

Somewhere, at this precise moment, a father is rationing water for his children. Dirty water. Water that will make them sick but will keep them alive another day. He is calculating survival in millilitres while I consider whether to have a second cup of coffee.

I do not say this to perform guilt. Guilt is useless. Guilt is the alibi we give ourselves so we can feel something without doing anything. I say this because the distance between his life and mine is not natural. It was built. Brick by brick, policy by policy, passport by passport. Someone drew a line and decided that his children’s thirst matters less than my comfort.

And I have been living on the comfortable side of that line, pretending I did not notice.

When I left Madrid at twenty-three, I believed I was leaving home. Now I understand I was only learning how many versions of home exist, how many ways there are to belong and not belong, how arbitrary the categories become once you stand outside them.

In Dublin, I was Spanish. In Lisbon, I was foreign but familiar. In Aarhus, I am something else entirely. A body with papers that say “yes, you may stay. You may work. You may walk these streets without fear.”

This is not freedom. This is permission. And permission can be revoked.

The bombs fall on buildings full of people who have never been asked for permission to exist.

We call it conflict, as if both sides were equal.

We call it ceasefire, as if the dying has paused.

We launder the language until the blood is invisible, until the child pulling her dead brother from the rubble becomes a statistic, a talking point, a thing we scroll past on our way to something easier.

What the fuck are we doing to one another?

I write this knowing the words change nothing. Knowing that somewhere a sniper is settling his crosshairs on a woman running for bread. Knowing that the calculus of violence continues regardless of my outrage or my silence.

But I write it anyway. Because the alternative is forgetting. And forgetting is complicity.

I think about the small violences. The ones we commit daily without naming them.

The neighbour I have never greeted. The homeless man I walked past without looking. The friend I have not called in months. The friend who needed something I could have given but did not.

We have been trained in isolation. Drilled in the religion of self-sufficiency. The market has taught us that every interaction is a transaction, that giving without receiving is a loss, that solidarity is a word from another century, sepia-toned and irrelevant.

This is the assassination we do not name. The slow death of the idea that we owe anything to the stranger.

My grandmother kept a pot of soup on the stove for “anyone who came to the door.” This was Madrid in the fifties. She didn’t have much. She gave anyway. Not because she was saintly but because she understood something we have forgotten: we survive together or not at all.

I have a stove. I have food. I cannot remember the last time I offered it to someone I did not know. Maybe I never did.

There is a sentence I keep returning to, a thought that feels like a key to a door I have been afraid to open. The only way to challenge this unsatisfactory situation was to be unrealistic. To breach realism’s heavily policed borders and to fully embrace unreality.

What if kindness is unrealistic? What if refusing to participate in the logic of scarcity is a form of rebellion? What if the most radical thing we can do is to insist, against all evidence, that the stranger’s child is as real as our own?

I think about borders. The ones on maps. The ones in our hearts.

The booklet with the word passport on the cover that decides who lives in safety and who dies waiting.

The invisible wall between me and my neighbour.

The glass screen that shows me horrors I can swipe away with my thumb.

We built these borders. We maintain them. Every day we do not dismantle them, we vote for their continuation.

What would I do if the bombs were falling on my building? If snipers watched my street? If my son’s ribs became visible through his skin?

I do not know. I cannot know. But I know what I am doing now, in the absence of that extremity. I am choosing, moment by moment, whether to remember or forget. Whether to see or look away. Whether to extend my hand or keep it in my pocket.

This is what we have. Small gestures against enormous indifference. The insufficient offering of presence in a world that teaches us absence is safer.

I do not know how to stop the bombs. I do not know how to rewrite the maps. But I know that every act of seeing, every refusal to forget, every moment of genuine solidarity with the stranger, is a vote for a different world.

Maybe that is not enough. It probably is not enough.

But the alternative is becoming stone. And I can still feel the weight of the one I swallowed years ago.

I would rather spend my life trying to spit it out.

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