Missed Connection

Did you ever run into someone you haven't seen in a long time and were perfectly content not to let them know how they knew you?

     I'm going to tell you something I am learning about life. If you have some disquiet in your mind, it will bubble up to the surface and you will see it in front of you. You may think you can manage it by ignoring it, but unless you deal with the disquiet, you will be faced with it in a way you cannot ignore.

     I met Ginger in college. She was a friend of a friend. She seemed to like me, but nothing ever happened.
     Short, with glasses that seemed heavy enough to crush her neck and possibly cause her head to roll off her body, Ginger spoke in halting phrases that, listening to them, cause you to feel as if so many beginnings of thoughts were still waiting to be finished long after you have finished with her. 

     She played a sweet and unassuming girl, but I lived next door to her one year, and I realized that she's a very nasty person at her center. When talking in this nasty way, she was not so halting, leading me to believe she was bottling up her real feelings in almost all everyday conversation.

     Anyway, I went to school in New York, so it was mighty surprising to find her in San Francisco. Even more surprising to recognize her, for her not to recognize me, and to be content not to call myself out.

     When I think about it, we spent a lot of time together trying not to give attention to one another. We were in a group of six friends, Sammy and her boyfriend Tom, Jennifer the blond (who I have a great story about but probably can't fit here), Naoki, Ginger and me. I think they were part of the same hall their freshman year; I was friends with Sammy only really, but it got me off my own floor.

     Ginger and I were the two people in the group of friends who didn't like each other, and didn't understand why anyone wanted to spend time with the other one. 

     But I remember talking on the phone with her several years ago, maybe a couple years after we were out of college. I would suppose a Facebook chat prompted the call, but I can't remember. More than a decade has gone by.

     Then there is Laurie. She was a teller at a bank I went to a decade or so ago. I used to look forward to seeing her quite a bit, and she seemed to like me too. Same sort of thing happened when I ran into her, and I still liked her, though I have no ability to do anything about it.

     There is kind of a perfect harmony to your reactions to people, whether you admit it or not. Time, place, these are excuses you make. You react because you react to the person, and you would react the same way to the same person no matter what the situation.

     Do I miss these people or did they miss me? 

     As I say, I feel a strange disquiet in my mind, and it is putting things in my way that are causing me to think about things I am refusing to deal with.

     I am intentionally disconnected from my past. I know no one from my past and I have nothing from my past, including, even, my possessions. I travel without my past but I have been working on the same struggles all this time.
     I am always outrunning my present. Treating those around me as transient features. I could make excuses for it, but that was the same then, as now. I have been waiting all this time for anybody to be worthy of me caring about them other than my wife, daughter and closest friends. Who can stand a person that behaves this way?
     I am glad I didn't say "hi" but I have to stand back and look at those who inhabit my same space. Fifteen years cannot go by again with nothing and nobody that is familiar.