accidental situations

sometimes when you're walking and then something catches you in the corner of the eye; no, no, it was probably a coincidence. How many people have that chin, that way of moving. In San Francisco there are so many waves of women that come into the city that have a certain tone of voice. 

How many really striking woman are there that look so much like someone else? I think I often write it down to a mistaken accident though when it is probably the real thing, and that makes it even more uncomfortable, because then there are two people who are consciously ignoring each other as the world is a very small place and when someone is that important to you you do not forget them.  

It's so hard to see what insecurities people harbor around each other until years later. Did she know that she made you feel unsure of yourself? Probably she didn't, because she was thinking about how you unsettled her and made her question so many things about herself, so much so that it blotted out all possibilities of reconciliation years later. 

There are these angry letters or curt exchanges years later, and it takes a few years after travelling over thousands of miles and then you lean back and say, "Ah, I understand." There's so much pressure to be great, and how can a young woman not compare herself to everyone around her and then react in any way but anger?

There are so many people who look like other people here in San Francisco, because it is one of those physical melting pots. Walking around a provincial town in southern Germany, it was very easy to stand out with my dark hair. Or sitting in a coffee shop in Poland, it was very easy for the many faces and bodies to melt into each other, and then look up in surprise when an African man materialized out of a sea of blonde dredlocks. Of course it's now the fashion for girls in northern Europe to dye their hair black or lay in tanning salons, watch MTV Shakira videos and then I'd blink my eyes and get the momentary illusion that I was in some kind of Latin America country with medieval castle background sets.

So you are in the situation where both of you have been on each other's minds for many years. In the backs of our minds we are both keeping tabs on each other through the soft chattering network of friends and acquaintances.

There are a lot of emotions in young people, and now that we are older, it would seem that it would be easier to sort these things out. At one time an older friend told me that these things settle down, and it will all be better in a few years, as he had been in the same situation in his youth. 

But it has been many years now, and there we are pretending not to see each other. In the mirror we see the weight of age, but on the street we see each other and can only see young girls. Why is it such that all these special women I know don't look like even the younger 30 year old women I encounter in my normal life? Everyone else is filling out and softly wrinkling, but a certain set of women is frozen in time, eternally youthful.  There is some kind of strange logic at play.

So many thousands of miles away from so many places I have lived here in California, and it's so amusing how many people I run into from so far away, even the ones that I want to see but don't want to. Is there a word for this kind of thing?  How can you not recognize each other?  And then is there a word for the point at which you stare at each other awkwardly, surprised at how little either of you has changed, and then walk away?