Charles always hated meeting people.
He didn’t have anything against people, as a rule. He enjoyed a good conversation, and there was something delightful about shaking someone’s hands and presenting himself in all the unspoken things: his zealously shined shoes, and tiger-print tie, and the smile he practiced in front of the front-hall mirror before he left the house. But everything after that? Pure torture.
His particular weakness was remembering names, and even when he thought he remembered, the crippling fear that he might be wrong, and he might call someone by the wrong name… better to avoid human beings altogether. It was the same with faces. One humiliating day he’d introduced himself to a new acquaintance twice, after having promptly forgotten their name, face, and last conversation. He’d remembered after she’d gently mentioned that they’d had this conversation an hour previously, and he’d wallowed in the embarrassment for the next six months. A tad melodramatic, perhaps, but to Charles, entirely reasonable. If such a faux pas wasn’t the end of the world, it was the next worst thing.
And even when you met people, it didn’t feel like you were meeting them at all. You got a dry list of facts, prepared for the occasion. Job? Insurance. Wife? No, no, still a bachelor *insert some oft-repeated joke.* The weather? He missed California. It was mind-numbing. He went to a wedding reception, talked to a hundred strangers, exchanged the same pleasantries and bullet points of condensed information and small talk, and walked away as empty and awkward as ever.
Thus, Charles became a collector of the odd and unusual icebreaker.
It started like this. A friend had invited him to dinner, at a shabby Olive Garden on the far side of town, with a couple he’d never met. Charles had introduced himself, shook some hands, promptly forgotten some names, and was sitting awkwardly picking at the breadsticks.
Maybe he was overtired, or not thinking clearly, or some fae had stolen his inhibitions while the waitress seated them. Because he looked up at the woman across the table (Mrs. Something-or-other) and said with perfect confidence, “If you had wings what would they look like?”
“What?”
Self-consciousness returned in full force. He made eye contact with the breadsticks. They seemed judgmental. “If you had wings. Like, to fly with. What would they look like?”
The woman stared. Her husband cleared his throat. The breadsticks said now you really look like an idiot don’t you?
“I think…” Mrs. Something-or-other said dreamily, “they’d be like fairy wings. All pink and glittery, y’know? Like stained glass.”
Charles glanced up from the bread-basket, and she was smiling. The husband laughed and started talking about the flight speeds of peregrine falcons, and his stint as a bird-watcher in college, and then it evolved into a conversation about a disastrous camping trip and three bald eagles, and by the time the salads arrived everyone was laughing. And when it came time to say goodnight, and there was more shaking of hands, Charles still couldn’t remember the woman’s name, but he did know that she wanted fairy wings the color of a sunrise, and that felt like far more meaningful knowledge to him.
After that, he started asking people questions.
“Where did you get that ring?” he asked the grandmother who introduced herself after the Sunday service and then took him to get coffee, producing a tale of a husband lost at sea a decade ago, who had raised parrots for a hobby and taught them all to sing the State Anthem of the USSR. “Was there ever a song that got stuck in your head for ages?” sparked a heated discussion on the merits (and lack thereof) of pop music. “If you had to be a creative work would you be a novel or a painting?” raised a certain amount of confusion, but also a fascinating discussion on communication and art.
He didn’t treasure up faces or facts. If you asked him who he’d met at his sister’s 27th birthday party, he couldn’t tell you. But he had stories. People liked telling stories, and thus, they seemed to like him too.
It didn’t entirely remove the twist of fear that came with walking into a room with fifty strangers or getting invited to the office Christmas party, but it helped. No longer was Charles the silent statue in a suit jacket, gripping his cup like a lifeline and praying no one made eye-contact, and wondering how long it would be until he could leave without being rude. He was never the life of the party—he never would be—but he was good at helping everyone else shine, and smile, and tell their tales.
And really, that was more than enough.