The Strangers We Carry
There are people who feel like they belong to a memory you can’t reach. They arrive as strangers, yet something about them feels almost hauntingly familiar, like you already know them.
There is something unsettling about meeting someone for the first time and feeling that you have met them before. Not their face or even necessarily their voice, but there is something about them too indisputable to discern. A familiarity that arrives without an invitation and a conversation that feels not like an introduction, but like a bookmark placed for you to pick up where you left off.
The strangest part about familiarity is that it does not always belong to the ones who stick around. It can chime to that someone you met at a party who you spoke to for hours and never see again. Individuals whose name you remember months later, though you have forgotten the names of the shoulder buddies you sat next to for an entire semester. People who laughed at your joke before you finished telling it and who seemed to speak a language you had never realized you knew.
Why do certain people feel as though they have always existed somewhere in the corners of our lives?
Why Do I Feel Like I Know You?
The human brain is a peculiar little historian. It spends its life collecting faces, voices, and fragments of experience, filing them away in cabinets we rarely return to visit. When we meet someone new, our minds begin making connections almost immediately. Before we have learned anything about them, our brains are already trying to decide whether they are like someone we knew.
Psychologists have studied the relationship between familiarity, memory, and attraction. A relevant concept to note is implicit memory through which previous experiences influence our feelings and behavior without requiring conscious recollection. We may not remember exactly where we have encountered a particular expression, but something about it can still feel substantial.
You may not necessarily be remembering the person in front of you, but responding to the emotions they awakened.
The conversation moves effortlessly. Silences do not need to be rescued. You find yourself sharing things you normally reserved for friends who have earned their place in your life over months or even years. There is no careful construction of a personality, no rehearsal of what to say next. You simply exist and that seems to be enough.
Of course, an instant connection does not mean two people are destined to know each other forever. We tend to fill in the blanks of a stranger with the qualities we hope they possess. We mistake possibilities for certainty because the mind is very good at turning a feeling into a story.
Still, the feeling itself can be real.
You may have never come across them before, but you recognize the version of yourself that appears around them. The one who is funnier, softer, more curious. They don’t necessarily remind you of someone you knew, they remind you of someone you have been in past reflections.
This may be what makes the encounter so unusual, expecting to meet a stranger, only to discover a part of yourself that had been waiting for the right company.
There Is Something About You
We talk about chemistry as though it is a mysterious force that chooses its victims at random. A person that walks into a room and the atmosphere tenses. Someone makes a joke and for some reason, you are the only person who laughed. You meet their eyes across a crowded room, and feel inexplicably, that you’re in on the same secret.
We call this a spark, a vibe, a connection. The vocabulary is vague because the experience often is too.
However, the psychology of connection offers few clues. People tend to feel closer when they experience responsiveness from one another: the sense that they are being understood, valued, and taken seriously. This can involve having shared humor, shared interests, and mutual curiosity, which all contribute to a feeling of ease and comfort. When someone makes us feel seen, an ordinary interaction becomes unexpectedly sincere.
There is a particular intimacy when being understood without having to translate yourself. For once, you don’t have to explain why a song makes you nostalgic or why you see beauty in details other people overlook. You are not working to make yourself understood, you simply are.
When that occurs with someone you have conversed with for 20 minutes, it can feel almost supernatural.
We underestimate how hungry we are for this kind of recognition, much of our daily life involves presenting edited versions of ourselves. We adjust our personalities to fit the room and decide which parts of ourselves are acceptable to reveal, making all that effort feel unnecessary when a person arrives at the room.
It can be tempting to call them a soulmate, even if the only thing you have shared is oxygen, but maybe the extraordinary thing is not that fate brought you together, it is that two people managed to recognize each other at all.
Time tells us how long someone has been in our lives. It does not always tell us how deeply they’ve pierced though them.
Unfinished Business
We can associate meaning with permanence. If someone matters, they should stay. If a connection is genuine, it should lead somewhere, no?
Truth is, not every meaningful encounter is meant to become a permanent fixture in our lives.
Some people arrive during particular versions of ourselves. They meet us when we are newly independent, falling in love with a city (like the way that I am falling with this one), or standing on the edge of a change we have not yet labeled. Their presence becomes attached to that period of our lives and when we remember them, we remember the person we were when we met.
They become landmarks in our private histories.
There is also a certain freedom in connections that never had time to become complicated. We can remember the feeling without having to navigate the reality of maintaining it.
An unfinished story can be tempting precisely because it never has to prove itself.
The kindest thing we can do is keep our peace and allow the story to remain unadorned without insisting that it must have a hidden meaning.
Our Caspers
Surely, the most haunting part of all this is how little control we have over whom we remember.
We lose touch with friends we thought would be our bridesmaids, then find ourselves thinking about someone who probably could not pick us out of a crowd.
Memory does not always follow the rules we would like it to. Sometimes, it keeps the smallest things: the way someone pronounced a word, the sound of their cackling laugh, the lingering smell of their cologne when you said goodbye.
Sometimes, it keeps the feeling, but not the person.
Some people are not meant to stay long enough to become part of our routines, but are simply there to interrupt them.
I hope we never become so accustomed to the ordinary that we stop noticing these little moments of recognition and I can only hope we allow ourselves to be surprised by the people we meet without immediately deciding where they will fit in our lives.
There is something so beautiful about discovering that the world is full of people we have not met yet, who may somehow feel like our grilled cheese and tomato soup: comfort.
Some strangers become friends, some become lovers, and others remain somewhere in between, attached to moments we never quite forgot.
Some stay exactly what they were when we met them, strangers.
And maybe the strangest thing about meeting someone who feels like a memory is realizing that somewhere in the future, you might become one of theirs, too.
Can you tell I wrote this listening to “Scott Street” by Phoebe Bridgers? Let me know in the comments below!