When traveling, I'll inevitably run into lookalikes of people I know or have known. Everything about them is the exact same: energy, facial expressions, height, rhythm, voice, cadence... except they are total strangers. But whomever they remind me of—friends, old teachers, students, relatives, doctors, coworkers, neighbors, people I grew up with, and all those who have passed through my life and are now strangers again—along with those I know well and hardly at all... it's as though they've returned, like a duende, as though they are really here again, right down to the gestures, the way they hold their cups of coffee or fiddle with their hair or manage their towel in the wind...its uncanny... And so I turn to TCF and predictably say, "doesn't our waiter remind you exactly of so-and so?" or "Oh wow... see that woman over there? She's like a carbon copy of my first yoga teacher." Or my great aunt. Or my dad.
...and then there are some people I see everywhere over and over again, like archetypes, so much so that they become family—stranger family—so familiar to me that I can foretell their gestures, what they'll say, and in rare moments, their entire life story...it's that known....and I have noticed this for years.
Oddly, I've never run into myself out there... why is that? Am I avoiding me?
Occasionally, some people I know will say they met someone while traveling, or they have a friend who reminds them so much of me and that we have to meet, that we'd love each other, but somehow that never happens; that other me that is out there somewhere remains elusive. And sometimes I wonder how I'd be with this other me, this mealike....would I be nice? Would I judge or be cold or find myself penetratingly boring? Or perhaps we would hug, tell each other I'm so happy to finally meet you...And then I realize how many strangers out there are reminded of someone in their lives when they see me, that I am over and over again someone else's mother, widow, bank teller, yoga teacher, sister, lawyer, memory...
