Angeleno Femme

You Had Me At Stranger

Don’t mind my rambling.

Sometimes, when we meet people, we assume they flash into existence upon that first glance, or that first handshake.

Perhaps this subconscious notion is bred from the same egotistical fantasy where we suddenly consider that nothing in the world exists unless we are there to witness it — turn your back to something and suddenly it disappears, you know that whole deal. Or where we toy with the idea that we are the only thinking beings, and everyone else is a zombie, put in front of us for us to engage with and learn from. Whatever the root of the inclination may be, it happens each day — this disinterest or confusion regarding a person’s life pre-you — and I’ve always run with it, to be honest. It’s natural. After all, how do we make sense of what we have not and cannot see? It’s like reading a history book, hearing about what someone did before you met them. You sort of absorb, blindly take it to be true, but spend the majority of your time pondering the unchartered future rather than the chartered, mapped past. For anyone who has ever argued that people have trouble living in the moment, I counter their argument with this we-just-met sensation: the second when the world splits and everything before that handshake is unknown, irrelevant and gone. You never even considered it, because there was nothing to consider. You didn’t know this person until just now. To you, they didn’t exist until just now…except…well, they did.  Nevertheless, from handshake on, it’s hard to detach that person from whatever they’ve embossed us with, as if fingerprint is the same as finger. It clearly is not, but we roll with it because to believe the opposite is troubling and too challenging to consider — that they somehow have existed and will continue to exist completely independently of you.

But I have moments frequently when I am at the top of my work building — some 30 floors in the Los Angeles air — and hear in my head: where are you? Sometimes I direct the question towards those who have come into my life and left. What are they doing? How are they? What are they thinking about? But not so much what are they doing in a grander sense, but more like what are they doing right this fucking second? That is so much more interesting to me. To think that I have shared connections with people that I now drift anonymously next to through the Angeleno currents again feels strange, sometimes disheartening, but mostly humbling. We leave lovers behind and wonder late at night if they are dating anyone, if they still think of us, but now all I wonder is, are you watching TV right now and clipping your nails? Where are you now and what are you doing? That, after all, is real existence to me. Everything else is just a fingerprint.

I’ve been stretching the concept even further lately. I lie in bed looking out my window into the Hollywood night and ask, Where are you?, but this time towards those I have not met, those who will change my life. I brought the concept up with a friend recently: “Don’t you think it’s strange,” I asked her, “that the person you are going to marry is just out there, just fucking living out there, probably in their apartment, doing something really mundane like trying to clean their kitchen sink, or brushing their teeth, or setting their alarm clock for their desk job? They are out there and you are sitting here and that’s where shit is at right now until life gives the OK for you two to meet.”

Instead of feeling disheartening, though, this leaves me feeling hopeful. Sometimes I get so caught up in my past, that I forget about the future I am to share with other people — the inevitable future that comes with life’s changes and things like bumping into a stranger at a grocery store or chance encounters through mutual friends. I once said to an ex who certainly altered my life, “Can you believe that months before we officially met we were within mere yards of each other at that restaurant you worked at, carrying on with our melodramas and silly thoughts, no idea that we’d end up falling in love with a stranger a few tables away?” Our paths hadn’t crossed with each other, but they had certainly crossed. He is now filed away into the “Where Are They Now” crowd, though. I look out over Los Angeles and wonder if he’s stuck in traffic on the 170, annoyed and searching for a song on the radio.

It started to fuck with my head, this idea that there are people in the world going about their daily business who will dramatically change the course of my life — I just haven’t met them, is all. What a strange concept. The whole thing sounds selfish, but really this is the antithesis of selfishness. It’s the realization that though you and another person will have an impact on one another in the future, right now, you don’t at all. Right now, you are utterly unimportant and so is he or she. For now, they are out there cleaning a cat box, making their bed, filling their car up with gas, staring at the ceiling and thinking about what they want for dinner. And for now, I am typing on my blog because I’m tired from long day at work, eating a Luna Bar, and feeling a bit lonely. Like two lines tracing their way through spacetime, each one is off doing their own thing, doodling about, completely unaware of the other line’s existence — what it looks like, sounds like, feels like — until they accidentally doodle into one another. It makes sense, I guess, that one of the only ways to understand your true separateness from another person — a separateness that always exists, metaphysically, but is hard to conceive of once they are in your life — is to understand them before you’ve ever met. After that initial encounter, that handshake, that hello, the game changes…you see the person through the lens of your life. But before the impact, the embossing, the fingerprint occurs, before they enter your life at all, we can conceive of them from afar — just as themselves — and understand their existence, their separation, them.

And there is something rather beautiful in that.

I can’t quite grasp the concept myself, and it leaves me happy and frustrated in the same breath, but it certainly makes looking out the window more interesting. And I wonder, when it comes to the next person who will shake up my life, where are you? Maybe you’re reading right now.

Quite literally the greatest email response I have ever received:

It all began when I was combing through some publications for freelance opportunities, contacting the general inboxes of magazines and sites asking if there is a specific person I am to pitch to. Everyone has been very helpful, except for this magazine that will go unnamed:

Me:

“Hi there,

Who would I contact regarding a freelance article pitch for *** Magazine?

Thanks and best wishes,

AJ Marechal”

Their response:

*** is the largest magazine in the world and does not consider itself a starting point for writers. If you have a good set of published clips and a strong idea that you think would fit in ***, you may determine the appropriate editor (listed in the magazine’s masthead) and send your query to the appropriate contact. To submit a pitch or query to ***.com, please send it to the attention of the Web editor. An editor will then get in touch only if we’re interested in your idea.

- The Editors

We should note the following:

1. I revealed nothing about my collection of published clips in my email,

and 

2. This magazine is sort of the antithesis of literary writing 

and finally 

3. The largest magazine in the U.S. is the AARP Bulletin, and the largest magazine in the world is The Watchtower, devoted to Jehovah’s Witnesses.

Yes I looked it up.