It did not come from a place of hate. More, a place of convenience. It’s almost impossible to hate a person you don’t know. Maybe you can judge them by how they look, they’re wearing the wrong size clothes, or they have too much gel in their hair. Pushing it further, if they smell particularly bad, you might dislike that intensely. But without speaking words to one another, you cannot know them, and thus cannot hate them.

It was certainly not a planned event. I did not wake up thinking that this was what I wanted to do with my day. Being where I ended up wasn’t even on whatever consisted of a schedule for me that day.

Everything boiled down to happenstance and convenience. I was there. He was there. We were at a vista pullout on the side of a mountain. I watched him with his camera, capturing the view at every angle he could, not paying any attention to anything else around him. He took a step forward to capture a butterfly, getting as close as he could to it without scaring it off. My arm extended automatically…