I met a good friend of mine on the West Coast. The type of person who listens as if craving to satisfy an undying curiosity, as if exploring a hidden thirst for the very words you happen to be speaking. We connected quickly, starting with the basic “where are you from” and then diving into the “do you think you deserve the life you have” type topics. During that first conversation, he said something that struck me. That while we were in our respective countries – he in Mexico and I in Pakistan, and while we were speaking different languages, practicing different religions, and socializing with different people, the core of our personalities was running parallel. He said that we are similar in essence, as if we are the same people only born in different circumstances.
I met one of the most important people in my life on the East Coast. The type of person whose very presence can add value to a substance-less room, can add a sense of grounding and stability that the room felt it did not need until he so willingly presented it. When I think back to lives running parallel, I think about how we went to a coffee shop the second time we met and discussed our college personal statements. How we realized that while one of us sat in Hong Kong and the other in Saudi Arabia, we had managed to write the same personal statement – same topic, same inspiration, same conclusion. I think about all our agreements that day. How we agreed on charity not being a moral obligation but a moral choice, on the dominance of contemporary and performance art over renaissance, on the ease with which we enjoy the finer and more delicate things in life. And I remember thinking that it was as if a part of me had been placed on the other side of the world. A part of me that grew and blossomed in isolation until I reunited with it in the coffee shop that day.
But with the similarities came a plethora of disparities. Mainly, it was the way we expressed our thoughts that was different – expressions inspired by the books we read for school and pleasure, the metaphors our parents used on one too many occasions, the words we stumbled upon to explain how we were feeling. It was in that space where we could live, discovering the things that made us different. The nuances that shaped us as individuals, and the parallels that bound us together. Each step in our lives brought us to a moment when we were in the same place at the same time. In this way, our paths collided, and we discovered pieces of ourselves in the other.
That reminds me of the time my best friend and I sat on the fire escape the day before we moved out of our apartment. We sat in silence, my legs swinging and hers solid like statues, taking long drags of Marlboro reds and looking at nothing in particular. There was so much depth, so much wisdom in the silence we built together. The same depth that drove her to write works of art, works of raw emotion sculpted on a page with an honesty that only few are endowed with. We were similar in our silence, but I found love that I had never seen before in the way she expressed her silence on the page. I found knowledge in the sea that she carries within her.
How many other parallels must be out there that circumstance blocks me from meeting? How many other fragments of myself have been scattered, waiting to be discovered? The people that I have met, the personalities that make up my life, share a piece of me. And in their desire to connect, these pieces brought us to where we are now. It is these people with their many parts that I live my life for, that I build myself with, and that I find my solace within. And it is these parts that I will look for in the individuals I encounter for the rest of my life – an endless search for my many soulmates sprinkled across the world.
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