DINNER WITH A STRANGER
The Bucket List
I used to believe my obituary would read like a bad joke. Found dead next to a half-eaten gas station burrito, pants around ankles, phone open to porn, just another casualty of poor timing and worse taste. It wasn’t death that scared me. It was the scene. The spectacle. That some stranger might unzip my body bag and see the real me: a loner with questionable browser history and unwashed underwear.
That fear of humiliation beyond the grave ran my life like a tight-lipped accountant. I avoided risk, refused spontaneity, and filtered every moment through the thought: How would this look if I died doing it? That’s why I deleted Twitter. Too many rogue nudes. One accidental heart attack mid-scroll and the wrong forensic photo goes viral. “Pervert Dies Laughing at Feet Pic.” No thanks. Better to disappear quietly, clinically, with fresh socks and no loose ends.
I didn’t travel. I didn’t gamble. I didn’t fall in love. Love is chaos. Love is a stranger with a scalpel, carving your name into their ribs while whispering, This won’t hurt a bit. I saw a man once die mid-climax in a news story. Aneurysm. They found him naked, mid-moan, a love song still playing in the background. That image buried itself in me like a seed.
Then one Thursday, my grocery delivery didn’t show up. Small tragedy, you’d think. But for me, it felt apocalyptic. I paced the kitchen floor. Called customer service. Spoke to someone who sounded twelve and treated me like I was senile. “Sir, you can just go to the store.” Just. As if the idea didn’t trigger a minor existential crisis. But eventually, I drove. Parked. Talked myself into exiting the car like it was a landing craft on Normandy Beach.
Inside the store, the fluorescent lights buzzed like hornets. The air was a swamp of onion powder and indecision. I felt my ears burn, like they always do when the anxiety sets in, hot, primal, shame-colored. I tried to focus on the cereal aisle when I saw it: a small black notebook tumbling from the back pocket of a man with a salmon-colored baseball cap.
It landed between us like fate. Or bait.
I tried to speak. Honest, I did. But my voice caught in my throat like a swallowed tooth. What came out was less “excuse me” and more frog-in-a-blender. So I picked up the book and chased him down like a nervous stalker in orthopedic sneakers.
He was comparing cans of beans. That’s what he was doing when I found him. Holding two of them like he could predict the future by fiber content. Up close, he was distractingly handsome. Clean-cut in that reckless, sun-kissed way. The kind of man who could ruin you with a grin and not even know it.
When he turned to face me, I froze.
“Hi,” he said. Like it was a question.
“You dropped this,” I muttered, holding out the book like it was radioactive.
He took it, our fingers grazed, and something short-circuited in me. A jolt. A charge. I wrote it off as static or loneliness. Same difference.
“What is it?” I asked, stupidly.
“The book? It’s my journal. Bucket list stuff. Feelings, adventures. Things I’d regret not doing if I croaked tomorrow.”
He laughed when he said croaked. I wanted to ask how he managed to be so casual about dying, but I said nothing. Didn’t have to. He filled the silence.
“I’m coming up on a year in remission. Cancer. Stage three. I figure if I’ve got time, I should use it.”
I was staring at this stranger in a grocery store, my heart pounding like a prison riot, and then he said: “Hey, look: ‘Have dinner with a stranger.’ That’s on my list. Not quite climbing Mount Everest, but wanna help me cross it off?”
And maybe that was it. The moment my life split open. Not with a bang, but with a bean aisle proposal from a beautiful man who smelled like cedarwood and lemons.
His name was Adam.
That night, I had dinner with him in a cramped apartment filled with plants and Polaroids. He cooked stir fry. I brought bottled water because I didn’t trust tap. He told me he once licked a glacier in Iceland just to say he did. I told him I once canceled a date because I had a hangnail.
We were opposites in every possible way. He was chaos wrapped in calm. I was order shaking in its shoes. And still, somehow, we met in the middle.
“I think you’re afraid of living,” he told me.
“I think you’re reckless,” I said.
“Maybe. But one of us is having fun.”
We kept going. Bucket list item by bucket list item. We went skydiving. I almost puked. We kissed at the edge of a cliff. We watched trash TV in hotel rooms in cities I swore I’d never visit. He made me climb a rock wall. I made him visit a library. We balanced each other’s madness.
He never mentioned fear. Not once. Even when the scans came back. Even when the doctor stopped saying “remission” and started saying “options.” He stayed beautiful. He stayed kind. Even in pain, he held my hand like it was a lighthouse.
“I’ve got twenty grand left,” he whispered. “In my kitchen drawer. Use it. Finish the list. Add to it.”
He died the next morning. Peaceful. Quiet. Not the way I used to imagine—tragic and absurd—but like someone who’d used every drop of life and had nothing left to fear.
I found the drawer. I found the money. I found the book.
And you know what?
“Have dinner with a stranger” wasn’t in it.
He never wrote it down.
He just lived it.
Next up: Mount Everest.
“Dinner with a Stranger” was a story that I wrote as an entry for the writing contest displayed below.
