Guy You Don’t Recognize Who Waved At You Fades Gently Into the Night

Chance Encounter Remains Unsolved Mystery of Life

At 3:25 PM, Wednesday of last week, something happened to an unnamed student at the end of T. Anne Cleary, the part where it stops feeling like T. Anne Cleary and merges into the dorms. That student was you, and you know it’s you because you’ve been thinking about it ever since.

After your 2:30 lecture, you were walking back to Burge, and someone waved at you. It’s not an uncommon occurrence for you. You’re not incredibly social, but you’ve stumbled your way through enough classes and parties and friend groups that people recognize you. Usually, you recognize them. “That’s Pavo, who lived on the same floor as me in Mayflower.” “That’s Sabrina, who was in the horrible Rhetoric class with me.” “That’s Oliver, who cheated on my roommate’s best friend and who doesn’t know I hate him yet.” But you didn’t recognize this one.

And that’s odd, no? From the way he waved at you, he seems to think you do. You don’t have a poor memory for faces; you could say, as part of an eyewitness account, that you’ve never seen this man. But he was enthusiastic—that was a full smile. He even said your name, took out an earbud to hear your response. So you smiled, you said hello, you waved back, and you walked on. But you didn’t remember his name, or even where he met you.

Night fell. You wondered: how does this man know me? Did you meet in the low light of a house party, drunk on the back steps? Did he sit behind you in a class, where he saw you raise your hand each time, but, eyes ahead, you never saw him raise his? You can’t have spoken much, but what if you had? There is a reality, you thought, in which you fished his name from the aether, in which you traded contacts, in which his presence in the rest of your life became more concrete, more than a shifting face in watercolor. Alas, you thought, the moment has drained into the pipes, and it is moving, moving on.You razed the house his single wave had built in your mind, and he drifted on to haunt another. He is leaves to the wind.

But what if we told you that was truer than you knew? What if we told you that, that evening, this man you met at some point you never knew walked out of his dorm room, across the river, and into the waiting night, to vanish from your world? Would you feel vindicated? Would it satisfy you to know he left the world in the same inconclusive manner he existed within it? Or would you feel a small pang of remorse, deeper than you can find the origin of?

And let you be assured, this cessation of being is not sudden. It is not like a tree falling in a forest, because that implies sudden violence, a moment within seconds where the tree transits from foliage to debris. This is soft and peaceful, like the tongues of deer dipping cautiously into warm water, like bubbles of dish soap popping down the drain, like Benjamin Button growing young. In a share of slow and singing moments, he is gone, and looking in between, you would know he was going, but you wouldn’t have the heart to stop him. It would simply seem to you that “going” is where he was meant to go.