The Once and Future Me

Yesterday I came face to face with my future. After taking my afternoon coffee break at the Reading Terminal Market (and of course, by “coffee”, I mean black and white milkshake), I walked side by side with my 30-years-older doppelganger. We met at the corner of 11th and Filbert when I looked to my right and saw him. He was wearing exactly the same outfit as I. Coincidence? Maybe. But keep in mind that my outfit was a pink gingham shirt, lavender and pink tie, khaki pants, black sport coat and brown leather saddle shoes. He was my height with gray unkempt hair and wire rimmed glasses. Blue eyes? Check. He was even carrying a book that looked just like the one I was reading with the cover taken off in his left hand, just like I was. Granted, he also had a copy of last week’s Entertainment Weekly with him, which I did not. However, that’s something that I have been known to carry. We gave eachother an awkward glance up and down. There’s a good chance he (or anyone else) didn’t catch onto the fact that I was a younger looking version of him, and he thought that I was just some psycho on the corner checking him out. We walked together for about a block and then parted ways. I should have said something witty to him like, “Nice outfit,” or “Great minds think alike.” But instead, uncharacteristically, I just waited back so it didn’t look like I was in a footrace with him. How mature. I did, however, wonder how I would react in 30 years or so if my younger doppelganger ever said anything like that to me. I like to think I would have some sort of witty retort.

The other night I caught up with someone from my past. I gave my friend AS a call after not talking to him in quite a while after I procured his phone number from a friend. He was one of my closest friends in college. We were immensely different, and everyone was quite surprised we got along as well as we did. I was pretty clean cut and well behaved, whereas he wasn’t into things like showering or drug enforcement laws. Still, we found our common ground somehow, probably through a combination of our low-grade misanthropy and burgeoning superiority complexes. That’s usually all the common ground I need. People always thought we were dating, even though we both usually had girlfriends. For some reason, and I am not even completely sure why, things fell apart abruptly at the end of college. Things were said and done, and we were just not friends any more. It really made me wonder what friendship was based on, and it heavily informed the way I conducted myself at the beginning of law school when meeting people. Did we run out of things to talk about? Did I do something wrong? Was I some sort of annoyance? Anyway, he’s coming into town for a wedding and suggested that we meet up for a drink. I am curious to see what it will be like to meet up with someone who only knows me from 5 years ago and before, someone who doesn’t really know ostensibly who I am now. How much of me is the same 5 years later? For that matter, how much of him is the same? Are we so different that we could never really get along again? I would hope that we kept the essential tenets of our personalities that made us friends in the first place. I would like to think that of everyone. Since most of my college friends with whom I currently communicate have been consistently parts of my life for the past couple years, they don’t offer the same insight to the difference between the old and new Zach that this friend does. The meeting may not even happen, despite the fact that it was his suggestion, but I hope it does. We have a lot to talk about. Grabbing a drink and talking about what happened will be coming face to face with my past.