People You Should Never Meet

I want to throw up.

It’s a Monday, which was supposed to be a nothing day. I came to the coworking space because my apartment had started to feel like a room I was waiting in, and I thought being around people doing things might help. He sits down across from me and I know within seconds, in the particular way your body knows things before it consults you, exactly who he is.

I spend the next fifteen minutes convincing myself I’m wrong. I’ve been dreading this collision long enough that maybe I’ve started conjuring it… seeing his face in strangers the way you see shapes in static. But then someone approaches him and I catch the edges of a conversation that answers questions I’d had since Saturday, and no. It’s him. The nausea returns slow and certain, like a tide that was always coming in.

He looks my way once.

Twice.

The third time he introduces himself, and the conversation is easy, of course it is, and I am smiling at someone I already know I’m going to have to let go. I bring up the mutual friend eventually, watch the warmth in him reorganize into something more careful, and then he packs up his things and says he has calls all day and leaves, and I sit there with my coffee and this feeling I cannot proportion correctly to what actually happened.

Which is when it occurs to me that he belongs to a specific category of person. One I’ve been assembling, without meaning to, for years.

People you should never meet. Not because anything would go wrong, necessarily. Just because some meetings ask more of you than they have any right to, and leave you holding something with no name, and the kindest thing would have been to simply never be in the same room.

There was a party, maybe two years ago, where I talked to her for three hours in a kitchen. Three hours of it being easy, the conversation moving the way good conversations move, where you keep finding the next thing without looking for it. At some point someone called her name from the other room and she said she’d be right back and she was, for a few minutes, and then the party redistributed itself the way parties do and we ended up on opposite sides of it and I spent the rest of the night aware of exactly where she was without moving toward her.

We have seven mutual friends. Yes, I’ve counted. I have seen her four times since. Once again, yes, I’ve counted. Each time is a version of the same experience, easy, warm, slightly too comfortable for people who don’t actually know each other, and each time ends with both of us leaving in different directions without exchanging anything that would make the next encounter different from this one.

The last time I saw her I was on my way out the door and she said it was good to see me and I said you too and meant it in a way that felt disproportionate and I walked to my car and sat in it for a moment before starting it.

I don’t know what I would do differently. I don’t think I would do anything differently. That’s the part that’s hardest to explain.

She finds me at a work event, a few years after we’d lost touch, and her face when she sees me is so genuinely warm that for a second I feel it too, the ease of being known, the relief of someone who remembers you without needing to be caught up. We hug. We say we should get together soon and both mean it in the approximate way.

Then she starts talking about who I was, which is different from who I am, and she doesn’t know that yet so I can’t be annoyed by it. She tells the people around us a story about me, something I did years ago that was funny, that was also evidence of a version of myself I’ve been quietly composting, and everyone laughs and I laugh too, and it’s fine, it’s genuinely fine, except I am laughing at someone I no longer am, in front of people I’m still becoming, and there’s this doubling I can’t shake for the rest of the evening. Two of me in the same room. Only one of them current.

She texts me the week after. We make tentative plans. I respond warmly and genuinely and we never follow through.

I think about her occasionally and feel fond and also relieved.

I find out the way you always find out about things like this, sideways, through someone who assumed you already knew.

A mutual acquaintance mentions it casually, in the middle of a conversation about something else entirely, the way people mention things they consider settled. Apparently I had done something. Or hadn’t done something. Or had done something that looked, from a particular angle, in a particular telling, like something worth being hurt by. I don’t know the details because I don’t know her, we have never met, have never been in the same room, exist to each other only as names in other people’s mouths. But somewhere out there is a person who has a story about me, and in that story I am not the narrator.

I turn it over for days. Not defensively, exactly, I believe her, in the abstract, that something happened that felt like something. I believe that hurt doesn’t require intention to be real, that you can wound a person cleanly from a distance without ever knowing you threw anything. What I can’t locate is the moment. I replay the relevant timeline and find nothing that matches, which means either the story changed in the telling, or I’m missing something about myself, or both.

The part that stays with me is this: she had to make sense of something, and the sense she made had my name in it, and I was never in the room to be anything other than what the story needed me to be. I don’t blame her for that. We all do it. We build the narrative that makes the pain legible, and sometimes that requires a person to stand in a role they didn’t audition for and would not have accepted.

I hope she’s okay. I hope the story did what she needed it to do. I hope, eventually, the version of me in it stops being useful and gets quietly retired, the way characters do when the story moves on.

We will never meet. That’s probably best for both of us.

I have never met her. This is correct and I intend to keep it that way and I still think about her more than I can justify.

The way you think about a room in a house you used to live in, wondering what color someone painted it after you left, whether the thing that was always slightly wrong with the AC ever got fixed. She moved into a life that had my shape in it once, which means she is navigating a set of rooms I know the layout of, in the dark, without a map I could give her even if I wanted to.

I wonder if they’ve talked about her parents yet, and how that went. I wonder if she’s learned which topics need a running start. I wonder if there are things I thought were particular to me that turned out to be particular to her, showing up again at different tables in different words. I wonder if there are things I thought were particular to her that turned out to be particular to me, and whether their absence surprises her sometimes.

I wonder if she feels me anywhere in the architecture. A cold spot in a room. A weight in a drawer that was emptied before she arrived.

I hope she’s okay. I hope the AC got fixed.

I cry at lunch. The kind that arrives in the middle of an ordinary meal and sits there while you let it. The Monday, maybe. The conversation that opened and closed in the same forty minutes. The near-miss I keep not-missing. The woman I’ve never met who might be sleeping in a room that used to hold my things. The other woman I’ve never met who has a story about me I’ll never get to hear in full.

Or maybe it’s simpler than that. Maybe it’s just the list, the whole generous, impossible list of people I was never supposed to meet, or never got to, or met wrong, or met too late, or never will. The connections that didn’t get to be what they were going to be. The doors already closed before I knew I was standing in front of them.

Or maybe it’s just April.

I think about him, packing up his laptop. Calls all day. The warmth reorganizing into caution, right in front of me, in real time. Or maybe not. Maybe he packed up his laptop because he genuinely had calls all day, and the shift I read on his face was something I needed to be there, and he went home and didn't think about it again. I did that. Not on purpose, just because I was in possession of a history that wasn't mine, because someone I love handed me a piece of their story and I carried it into a room. He came in that morning just a person, sat across from a stranger, had an easy conversation. And then I said her name and something in him went careful and quiet, or maybe it didn't, and either way he was never going to get that Monday back. Neither am I.

I don't know why that's the thing that makes me cry. Out of everything on the list, out of all of it, it's that, not even knowing if I hurt someone, on a nothing day that was supposed to help.

My dog watches me from across the room with the particular expression she has, the one that doesn’t ask questions. I finish my lunch.

The list stays open.