Do I know you?

It's happened to me more than once. I'm in a meeting and being introduced around, when the feeling hits me as I see someone across the room: Do I know you? And then the question follows:

Have we met before? Something feels familiar. Soon we know it's a first meeting.

At least... in this lifetime.

I've come to realize we each have people we knew, loved, and grew together, before this life began.

I experienced this for the first time when I was in the fourth grade. We moved during the school year, changing my home, school, city and state. My first day in class I saw a friend I left behind. I didn't understand how it was possible, but there she was.

My expression after seeing her got a reaction. It wasn't long that a note was passed to me. It was from her. "Do you like me?" I answered back, "Yes." Within days she invited me over to her house to spend part of a Saturday together. I viewed it as an opportunity to find out how this move happened. She thought I was the hot looking new guy in school, and this was a date.

Now, remember, this was fourth grade, and I was still figuring things out. Quickly enough I realized that she wasn't the friend I left behind, even though there was something very familiar about her. She too, could read the room and knew I didn't have THAT kind of interest in her.

Later, as I would see her everyday, I could tell, she didn't look like my friend, act like my friend, or was my friend from the other city. We eventually graduated from high school together, but it was never the friendship I thought I had before the move.

How did I confuse her with someone else?

Being in a new school with strangers all around, I needed an anchor, and so maybe my brain triggered a match that wasn't really there. My old friend gave me someone to latch onto. Sadly, after that Saturday "date", the girl I thought I knew, was barely more than one of the strangers I would get to know. At least that's the logical answer for what happened.

It could also be that when I moved to the new school, my path crossed that of another's from a past life. We had each begun a new life (thank you reincarnation), and accidentally crossed paths again.

This could be what happened because we don't usually remember much about our previous lives. Such memories fade quickly in the first four to five years, when the past is still recent. And then we remember nothing but inclinations, feelings of déjà vu, which means "already seen", and experiencing what scientists and neurologists generally view as a harmless "glitch" or mismatch in the brain's memory processing.

Was I experiencing a glitch?

Or did I stumble onto someone I knew from a past life?

I thought I knew her.

I didn't.

But maybe I had.

Mj