The Stories We Write About Strangers

It started on a bench. I was sitting in the city, out of the sun for a minute, when I noticed the looks. Not hostile, not friendly, just looks. The kind that land on you and slide away before you can decide what they meant.

Here is the honest part. I had no idea what they were about. Maybe it was the obvious thing, that I am a Black man in a country where I do not blend in. Maybe it was something smaller, the way I was sitting, one leg crossed over the other, a thin guy who does not take up much room. Or maybe it was the day, because a few streets over the city was filling up for the Pride parade, and a stranger glancing my way had no way of knowing why I was there or where I was headed. Neither did I, really. I was just out walking. But I could feel a story being written about me in real time, and I was not the one holding the pen.

Today was Budapest Pride, the 31st one. I will keep the facts plain, because this is not a political note. In March 2025 Hungary’s parliament passed a law that effectively banned the march. This past April the European Court of Justice ruled the law behind it unlawful, and after an election the same month brought in a new government, the Budapest police approved this year’s parade, finding no grounds to stop it. So this was the first Pride here to walk with the city’s permission since that ban. That is the backdrop. It is not the subject.

What held my attention was not the parade. It was everyone around it. People smiling. People shaking their heads. People crossing the street early so the whole thing would not touch them. A hundred small verdicts handed down on a sidewalk, most of them about people the person judging had never spoken to.

I know that sidewalk from the other side. Being visibly different, whatever the reason, means people start reading you before you open your mouth. I have felt it as a foreigner and as a Black man, and watching the parade I recognized a cousin of the same feeling in the people walking in it. I am not saying the two experiences are the same. They are not, and I would never flatten one into the other. What they share is narrower and, I think, more useful to name. Both put you in front of strangers who have already decided who you are. A flag, a skin tone, a walk, a headline. One detail, and the blank gets filled in. Case closed.

And it runs in every direction. I have been on the wrong end of a snap judgment, and I have made plenty of my own. Every group has its good people and its difficult ones, its kindness and its faults, and none of that shows up in a glance. The glance does not sort for character. It sorts for category, and the category is almost always wrong about the person standing in it.

Living here taught me something I did not expect. Most people are not thinking about me nearly as much as I once assumed. They are trying to get to work, pick up their kids, buy groceries, figure out dinner. The looks that felt like a verdict were often just a tired glance from someone with their own long day. That is humbling in the best way. It shrinks the story I tell myself about how much of a stranger’s attention I actually occupy.

There is someone in my family I think about whenever this comes up. Over the years, this person’s life changed in ways that surprised some of the people around them, more than once. I will leave the details theirs to tell. What matters is that none of it ever changed what they were to me, which was family. It never crossed my mind to ask how they could be the person they were. No one at home loved me any less for loving them, and I never loved them any less for being exactly who they were. I did not need the whole story explained before I could care about the person in it.

That is the heart of it. Curiosity has opened far more doors in my life than certainty ever has. Every friendship I value started the same way, with me admitting I did not yet know the story. So on a day when a lot of people felt very sure about a lot of strangers, the question I kept circling back to was a quieter one. Am I responding to the actual person in front of me, or to the version of them I wrote before they said a word? Most of the time those are not the same person. And the one I am most likely to get wrong is the one I never bothered to ask.