I Believe We Are Each Other’s Ghosts — While We’re Still Alive
We don’t have to be dead to haunt each other. And that’s a beautiful thing.
There’s this guy I met over a decade ago as if by some cosmic joke. Once upon a trip to the bars, I announced to my friends that I was temporarily swearing off sex, thanks to a sudden emotional epiphany that I needed to process — and that’s the evening when a tall, handsome stranger approached, drink in hand, to try to woo me. This was our meet cute. And though our lives have always been on such separate tracks that we never did get as far as dating, we struck up a friendship that has endured across existential eras and opened my eyes to a rare kind of wonder.
I realized early on that he and I seemed to be entangled in some sort of soul-family situation: kindred interests, a mutual sense of deep familiarity, and so many profound interconnections that linked our social worlds even before we met. It’s been years since we’ve lived in the same town, but we still reach out every once in a (long) while to express gratitude for our connection. Quite simply, we care about each other.
Yet what never ceases to amaze me is that, from that very first night at the bar, he always seems to show up or reach out at precisely the most pivotal moments in my journey. Such as…
