This morning as I was waiting for a bus I noticed a girl waiting as well. She was reading a book, and had crazy white and black hair. When I first looked at her, something was nagging at me. She looked really familiar but I couldn’t pin down why she looked familiar. I kept puzzling over it, and kept glancing over, and finally just decided I couldn’t take it, so I asked her:

“Hi, um, so I keep looking over at you because you look super familiar to me and I can’t figure out why. Where do I know you from?” Immediately realizing that this sounded like a pickup line (which I didn’t want her to think at all, me being very happily married), I said quickly “I’m genuinely curious, I just can’t place, it, I swear it’s not a pickup line or anything.”

She seemed relieved at that point, but didn’t seem to want to play along. I asked “did you grow up in Orange County?”, and she tentatively said “Yes”, and I said “I went to Marina High School in Huntington Beach, did you go there too?” and she said “No, but I went to Ocean View.” Ocean View High School was another high school in the same district, so I had narrowed it down to the city at least.

She asked “what elementary school did you go to?” and I said “College View”. Her face sort of lit up, and she said “so did I!” I asked her name, and she told me (I’m leaving it out of the story because I don’t know if that’s right, mentioning someone’s name on the Internet who may want to remain anonymous) and it turns out that I remember her from my 4th grade class and she remembered me.

We were both dumbfounded, and talked about what the odds were. I told her about living in Portland with Carrie and the kids, and she told me that she went to fashion school and was designing clothing.

We parted ways when her bus came.

The odds of this happening are probably not as slim as I think, but it’s still pretty crazy. Maybe even crazier is the fact that I hadn’t seen her since the 4th grade, and through all the years, somewhere in my head her face still remains in my memory to the point that she looked familiar enough to motivate me to ask. Pretty amazing, human memory.