The Kindness I Almost Forgot

The Kindness I Almost Forgot

It’s strange how the grand events of our lives—the graduations, weddings, promotions, and heartbreaks—fade into a soft blur over time, while tiny, passing kindnesses from people we barely knew cling to us like stubborn threads we can’t quite untangle. The faces sometimes blur, the names slip away, but the feeling… the feeling lingers.

I was nine years old the first time I felt it. My mother had dragged me to the grocery store on a gray, unremarkable Tuesday. I was sulking by the magazine rack when an elderly woman with soft, watery eyes bent down to my level and handed me a single butterscotch candy.

“Looks like you need a little something sweet, sweetheart,” she whispered with a conspiratorial wink.

It wasn’t the candy that stuck with me—it was the way she saw me. A sullen, impatient kid ignored by the world, suddenly acknowledged by a stranger. I’ve forgotten her face, but not the warmth she left behind.

Years later, in my reckless college days, when my heart was heavy and my bank account light, I missed the last train home after a disastrous date that ended with me sitting alone on a rain-soaked bench. My phone was dead. I was drenched and humiliated.

A cab driver—an older man with a thick accent and a kind face—rolled down his window and asked if I was alright. I told him I didn’t have enough for a fare home. He waved it off.

“Get in,” he said. “You remind me of my daughter.”

The ride was silent except for the gentle hum of the tires on wet asphalt. When I tried to pay him with the crumpled bills in my pocket, he pushed my hand away.

“Just promise me you’ll be kind to someone else someday.”

I never saw him again. But on nights when loneliness crept in, I remembered his words.

There was the waitress at the diner two towns over who gave me an extra slice of pie the day my dog died. I hadn’t told her, hadn’t needed to. Maybe it was the way my eyes looked, or the way my hands shook when I reached for the coffee. She simply placed the pie in front of me with a quiet, “On the house,” and a pat on my shoulder. That sweetness—the small mercy of it—tasted better than anything I’d eaten all week.

And the boy on the bus when I was twenty-four. I was crying quietly into the collar of my jacket after getting a rejection call for a job I desperately wanted. The bus was full, but no one noticed me except a boy of maybe twelve, sitting two rows ahead. At his stop, he passed me a folded piece of notebook paper before slipping off the bus. Inside, in shaky, uneven writing, were the words:

“You’re gonna be okay.”

I carried that paper in my wallet for years.

Even now, these fragments of memory flood in unannounced. I think about the teacher who let me stay after school just to sit in the empty classroom because my parents were fighting at home. About the neighbor who shoveled my sidewalk the winter my father left, without asking or expecting thanks. About the woman at the airport who let me cut ahead in security because she could tell by my face that my heart was breaking.

So many kindnesses I almost forgot.

The older I get, the more I realize how fragile we all are. Everyone you pass on the street carries an invisible weight. Some are hunched beneath grief, others dragging loneliness behind them like a long, tattered coat. And sometimes, it only takes the lightest touch—a compliment, a shared laugh, a moment of eye contact—to lift it for a while.

I wonder how many tiny kindnesses of my own people carry. If the smile I gave the woman on the subway years ago meant something to her on a hard day. If the book I left on a park bench, inscribed with “Take me, I’m yours,” found its way to someone who needed it.

We think we need to do something grand to matter. But often, it’s the smallest gestures, given freely and without expectation, that linger the longest.

This story is a collection of those moments, scattered like loose threads in the fabric of my life. A reminder to myself—and maybe to you—that no act of kindness is ever truly lost.

Even the ones we almost forgot.