Kindness is a language the deaf can hear and the blind can see.

I was twenty-three, alone in a small mountain town in Georgia — the country, not the state — when I began to feel wrong. My chest hurt, my hands wouldn't stop shaking, and my three words of Georgian evaporated the second I needed them. I found a clinic by pointing at a symbol on a map. Inside, the waiting room was full of older women in dark coats, and I sat on a plastic chair understanding nothing that was said around me.

My hands were freezing, my heartbeat loud enough to hear. I must have looked terrified. The woman next to me — grey hair pinned back, deep lines around her mouth — didn't say a word. She simply reached across the small gap between our chairs, took my hand in both of hers, and held it. Her hands were warm and rough and smelled faintly of bread.

She held on. When my name was finally called, thirty minutes later, she squeezed once and let go. I never learned who she was. I don't know if she prayed for me, or thought I was someone's grandson, or simply saw a scared boy and did the obvious thing. But in a country where I could not understand a single sentence, I understood her completely.