Even stranger

The man behind the counter seemed so familiar. His voice. His stories. The way he talked. I was sure that I didn’t know but I couldn’t stop staring, trying to place him. He reminded me so much of someone I knew and liked. Loved even. If only I could remember who.

For a while, it seemed almost there, on the tip of my tongue, dancing through the dark recesses of my mind, finding a spotlight and spinning into the wings when I’d almost placed him. I sat for a while, listening to him chat up the couple who bought sandwiches with Swiss.

“It comes with Swiss,” said the girl in the short dress, a girl who would be impossibly cold on the plane in an hour or so. The man behind the counter probably knew how to make the sandwiches on the menu, but she was full of pronouncements.

“We’re going to Argentina,” she said, tugging on the front of her boyfriend’s T-shirt. “It’s going to be, what, 80 tomorrow?”

The boyfriend smiled sheepishly and stepped back, his shirt still in her grip.

“A very mild winter,” she laughed.

I stopped listening, stopped trying to place the man, stopped short of correcting the girl. It wasn’t winter in South America. Not yet. And it wouldn’t be 80 when it was. It wouldn’t be 80 when we arrived, but it didn’t matter. It was her vacation. Mine, too. I sank back into my sandwich, my computer with the French dictionary that did funny things to my words and my punctuation, the classic rock blaring somewhere over my head. It didn’t matter.

Eventually, I forgot about the man, the one who reminded me of someone I knew and liked. Maybe loved. That didn’t matter either. The older I got, the more people reminded me of someone else.

A lifetime ago, I decided that everyone I met reminded me of one of the 23 people in my first grade class or the dozen or so adults I knew at that stage.

A lifetime ago, my parents, teachers and after-school special drilled a mantra into my head.

“Never talk to strangers.”

But the older I got, the less strange people seemed, reminding me as they so often did of the 23 people in my first grade class or the dozen or so adults I knew at that stage.

Over the years, like an old cotton sweater, the theory stretched and shrank, growing wider and shorter all at the same time, and everyone reminded me a little of everyone else, the stories, the memories, the features overlapping into vague impressions of people I just met. People I liked, maybe even loved, and people I didn’t, and the lines kept blurring.

I let people into my head and I let people into my bed. Strangers became friends. Friends became lovers. Lovers became strangers again and we drifted.

It wasn’t 80 degrees when we landed and it still wasn’t winter. I saw the girl in the painfully short dress with a scarf and sunglasses near baggage claim and recognized her, the memories of her building on themselves. Someday soon, someone would remind me of her and I would roll my eyes. Someday, someone would remind me of the man behind the counter and the man I liked. Maybe loved. And I would struggle to place him.

In the meantime, I would continue to talk to strangers that didn’t seem so strange. To make friends. To take lovers. To lose touch and see friends and lovers turn into strangers. We would all drift.

Tag: Travel