Strongly Worded

Coincidence?

My brother just met a new dating prospect, at a concert, in New York City. It turns out that her mother teaches at my alma mater (in Massachusetts). And, in fact, her mother was not just one of my professors but also my major advisor—the woman who wrote me the most amazing recommendation letter, flinging open a number of professional doors.

I am no longer surprised when such coincidences emerge. It really is a small world, especially in New England, among people from or in concentric social and academic circles.

My friend Avi once hosted a party at which he encouraged the dozens of guests to chart their connections. He put his name in the center of a large sheet of newsprint and the guests wrote their names in circles along the edge of the page. The layout resembled a child's drawing of the solar system. The guests drew lines to their names, writing ragged magic marker explanations: "Avi's college roommate", "Avi's sister", "Avi's friend from lab."

After a while, the guests identified the links between each other. We all marveled at the number of new connections; by the end of the night, the chart consisted of a tangle of lines and names, some red wine, and a dash of spinach dip. Ariella had come to the party with Avi's sister, but she knew me from college and her brother had once been my camp counselor.

I met my last roommate (now my close friend, the one who has a baby) on bostonapartments.com.. Within days of cohabitation, I discovered that she was dating the ex-boyfriend a woman I'd met briefly in Spain. My other roommate, it turned out, had studied on the same junior year abroad program as I had. She had also lived with the ex-girlfriend of the guy I was was dating at the time.

Even though all our lives intersect all the time, we uncover these connections with undiminishing surprise and delight. New acquaintances actively work to uncover them. Sometimes I wonder why. My college had close to 2,000 students, and I am repeatedly asked: Did you know a girl named Sarah? She's short, with brown hair, I can't remember her last name, but I think she lived in a dorm with ivy on it?

Even when the woman in question is Sarah Horowitz, with whom I lived during my entire first year of college, the initial elated reaction quickly evaporates into anticlimactic silence:

"Wow, so you know Sarah!"

"Yeah! That's crazy!"

"We used to be roommates. We got along really well."

[Moment of tension: my friendly recollections could be met by a gasp of horror if the person I'm talking to is, unbeknownst to me, Sarah's mortal enemy or the girl she screwed out of a sublet junior year.]

"What's she doing now?"

"She does computer trainings and is applying to grad school."

"Cool."

[Silence]

"Excuse me. I'm going to go snag some chips."

In fact, I ran into the real live Sarah Horowitz two years ago, at a spectacular all-female brunch hosted by a mutual friend. Neither Sarah nor I knew that the other would attend, but I immediately recognized her. Sarah’s looks hadn't changed at all in the six years since we'd last seen each other. Still, she came right up to me and my broccoli quiche and brazenly introduced herself and her current roommate. She actually said, "Hi, I'm Sarah." And I chortled and responded, "Hi, I'm Dori, and I lived in the same room with you for an entire year!"

Sarah cringed, and attributed her slip to too much champagne. I could see that the exchange had unnerved her. When Sarah transferred to a different college, each of us had dismissed the other as lost in space. Suddenly we had to confront the fact that we were simply part of a bigger orbit that encompassed both of us.

It felt jarring that Sarah had moved on, moved forward without me, despite a year of sharing stresses and triumphs and a halogen lamp. Apparently, this closeness did not bond us together at all; six years later, I'd become some girl at a party who looked vaguely familiar. Sarah's life continues even without me in it, my life continues without her. And our unexpected meeting forced us to confront that fact.

There’s no getting around the six degrees of separation—even when one is intentionally separating. (Best) case in point: once, despite feeling estranged and jet lagged at the start of a short trip to Venezuela, I attended a crowded party and recognized the familiar accent of an evidently Israeli guest. I was able to establish that this woman was originally from the same city as my parents, and I tried to launch into the process of mapping our orbits. The woman stopped me abruptly; "I haven't been back in over twenty years and I'm really not in contact with anyone from there."

"But maybe you know Eitan Rosen?" I probed: friendly, social. And the other woman had to cough into her napkin when she admitted, "he's my brother."

Posted by Dori at 9:05 AM