you, too?

There is comfort in seeing yourself in someone else.

Maybe it comes from knowing you’re not the first one who’s made that mistake. Maybe it lets you know your taste isn’t as strange as you thought. Maybe it’s just part of being human, one of 7 billion in the world -- no two exactly alike, but not altogether different, either.

As I stirred honey into my herbal tea, a nice looking young man stepped up to the counter beside me. He took the lid off his cup, lifted out a bag of full-leaf herbal tea, and squeezed a pack of honey behind the mermaid’s head. “There’s a kindred spirit,” I thought to myself. “I bet we could be friends.”

I watched the clock, ready to go home to my pajamas and a hot bowl of soup, licking my mouth in the spot where twenty years ago I would’ve sucked my shirt collar. While the teacher’s voice droned on, I looked across the room to see a classmate with the neck of his sweatshirt tucked between his lips. “Oh, he does that, too.”

Holding the phone stiffly against my cheek, I tried to be honest without sounding pathetic. I answered some questions and gave a meager account of my current events, expecting with every sentence to be interrupted. “Yeah, it’s tough to be just passing through.” Oh, so he feels that, too.

It’s when you have a great idea for an invention and then find it in the Harriet Carter catalog. It’s when you find the same Scripture quoted on two different blogs on the same cold, rainy morning. It’s when I look into a girl’s eyes and instantly know what she’s fighting.

It’s in these moments that I realize something very important: life is too short to think you’re the only one. You are not the only one who ____________.