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[I'm going to ask you to tear this apart. I'm thinking about submitting it to our school's literary magazine so it needs to be perfect. Seriously, be as harsh as you possibly can on the story itself. Just be nice to me when you tell me about it. smile ]
Everyone in this world has an other.
Your other is you, more or less. They will look like you, talk like you, dress like you, and have that same habit of biting their lip and tilting their head to the right when thinking that you do.
Most people never meet their other. The odds are literally one in a few billion that you ever will. Some people go their whole lives living three blocks away from their other and never meet them. Some people spend their entire lives on a search for their other. It eats away at their very core. And usually it’s futile.
This is the story of how I met my other.
My name is Arianna. There is nothing really remarkable about me, no reason that out of billions of souls mine was chosen to find that person who is another me. I was not one of those people who invested in the search to find my other: I knew she was out there somewhere, living her life. Sometimes at night I’d wonder if she was going to have the same dreams I did, if she ever thought about meeting me. But I was not particularly concerned with meeting her. People go their whole lives without knowing their other and are completely content; I was perfectly ready to do this exact thing.
The day I met her was rather unremarkable as well. There was nothing in it that would have made me believe it would be the most profound day of my life. The sun rose, the birds sang, my little brother was annoying. I planned to spend the day reading.
I had gone to the library in search of a book. I love libraries: they are full of potential. Every book, every page, it’s a new beginning, a new chance, a new life. I can spend hours simply wondering the shelves, pulling down books at random, flipping through them, losing myself in a page or two. Because of this tendency it is my unfortunate curse to leave the library with almost more books than I can carry every time I go. I almost always want to read every book I pull down from the shelves. Of course I have my favorite authors and books and genres. But somehow, I never seem to be able to find a book I don’t want to read.
And so, after an hour or two (I wasn’t keeping track of time, it was Saturday after all), this is how I found myself attempting to exit the library with an armload of books that I could barely discern the world around me over the top of. I was fighting my way to my car, trying to avoid shapes that looked in any way solid. I stepped off the curb, trying desperately to avoid slipping or losing my armload of books…and stepped into something very solid indeed which hit me with such force it must have been moving too.
Books went flying in every direction as the asphalt of the parking lot rushed up to meet my face. I hit hard: with all the books in my arms I hadn’t had a real chance to catch myself. I felt something wet and sticky on the side of my face that had newly become acquainted with a rather hard and unforgiving ground: I knew right away I was bleeding.
I began to peel myself off the ground, preparing a few choice words for the idiot who had run into me while I did so. Halfway into a standing position I looked at the offender and nearly fell down again: it was like I was looking into a mirror the wrong way. She had my face, her hair was even parted on the left like I always had mine. We both seemed to catch a glimpse at each other at the same time: I knew right away that her face showed me exactly what mine looked like in that moment. I looked into the unfamiliar green eyes that I had seen every day, and noticed right away that her right eye had subtle traces of gold in it. Something I could only have noticed if I had looked at it in my own eye for seventeen years.
Somehow we both ended up standing again. For what was either a few minutes or an eternity, we simply stood there, absorbing each other. In seeing her body shaking slightly I realized that I, too, had a body and that it, too, was almost imperceptibly shaking in shock. In seeing the puffs of smoke that were her freezing breath, I realized that I was breathing, shallow and rapidly. In this moment, her existence validated mine.
In another of those reverse-mirror image moments, we both raised our right hands at the same time, reaching toward the other to confirm that this was in fact a person, not a hallucination. I brushed her left arm as she brushed mine, and we both recalled our hands in a mixture of horror, shock, awe, and joy at the exact same time, with the exact same movement and gasp of breath, until our hands hung limply at our sides.
“You’re…” I said.
“How…” She said.
We said this simultaneously. We had both seemed to discover that we had voices at the same time. The same “what next?” smiles played at our lips. I spoke first.
“Arianna.” It was all that was needed, I knew it was what she wanted to know, just my name, because it was the thing, above everything else, I desperately wanted to know about this familiar stranger in front of me.
“Ariadne.”
So it was true, at least for us, the rumor that your other will even have a name similar to yours. As a class assignment some time ago, I had done research into the history and meaning of my name. Because of this I knew our names were not only similar…both meant the same thing. My name, actually, finds its base in hers. The Greek “Ariadne” becomes the Italian “Arianna.”
Now that this most important question was out of the way, I was lost. I saw the question “what next?” clearly reflected in Ariadne’s eyes.
Three hours later we were still sitting at a table in the small coffeehouse down the street from the library. It was spooky, how well I knew this girl and yet how little I seemed to know. I was learning about myself in a strange way: through the eyes and experience of someone else. I learned more about myself in those three hours than I had ever known.
In discovering her, I found me.
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