Ela looking for new random friend... (photo: Timo Jarvinen)

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I cross random people’s life. Every day. Over and over again. Recently, I’ve been asking myself if all these alleged ‘random encounters’ would actually follow rules. Assuming that not only I, but also these random beings go after the same routines every day would consequently mean that I cross these people’s life every day at the same time at the same spot. This supposition on mind is how I went through my life as a commuter the last couple of days. And, lo and behold, yesterday I bumped into a person out of my circle of random acquaintances for the second time. It was on one of the escalators of Zurich’s central station. I was on the way up, he on the way down, and we shared a moment, just as when our paths crossed for the first time. I got so excited to have my hypothetical thought practically proven that I had to keep myself back from shouting out loud, jumping over the handrail in between the two escalators (that at the very moment felt like the only thing that could ever separate us), hug my new random friend effusively and never let go again.
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What eventually stopped me from overreacting was a whole range of yellow buckteeth. New random friend had realized that all my attention was on him and mistook this as a flirt attack on which he answered with the shiniest smile the world would have ever seen if only he had considered teeth bleaching or at least some braces sometime in his life before… For the very moment, this smile might have been good enough to distract me from his mid-forty hair loss and the blubber around his hip, but I was in shock. Not only because I had accidentally been phantom flirting with a guy that was four times my size, but also because I was able to prove that there were parallel lives to my life. Now what if this more or less random encounter with new random friend wasn’t the only time our lives would cross daily?
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I got caught in that thought and the yellow shiny buckteeth smile dogged me for the rest of the day. Away from the escalators to my home kiosk where I went to buy chewing gums just as every day, I suddenly was a 100 percent sure that this was new random friend’s home kiosk, too, and the change I had now received were the coins his sweaty podgy fingers had been paying with right before. Running from there to the tramway station in order to be one of those who would catch a seat, I ended up giving up my seat to someone else as all of a sudden I knew that this was exactly the seat new random friend had been sitting on just a couple of minutes ago.
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Random encounters or not random encounters, even thinking of it rationally keeps the possibility quite high that our lives cross well structured with random people’s lives over and over again. Yesterday at least, new random friend and I were the main characters in some sort of episodic film and he was even present when I bumped into my new favourite dress in a shop window while doing some after work shopping. It was love at first sight and I was convinced the dress was going to be mine really soon. What I didn’t expect to change my mind was the sudden thought (that came up on the way from the cloths rail to the changing room) of new random friend’s yet still more or less skinny 17-year-old daughter out of first marriage that had just tried on this dress before me, not fit in and consequently put back on the cloths rail wherefrom I had taken it. No way therefore, I could even try this dress on, much less make it mine…
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You might call me a hypochondriac victim of stalking, but not knowing how many other daughters on plus new random friend might possibly have, is killing me. Will I ever be able to shop dresses in public stores again?
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Thank God Quiksilver Women has now an e-store…
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Ela, probably hypochondriac
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