I Don't Remember Who I was Before I Knew You

“The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed.”

— Carl Jung

I’ve read that the way we experience linear time is a false misunderstanding of how things are actually unfolding in our Universe. When we look at time and space and reality through a scientific lens it appears more likely that everything is happening all at once. 

Oddly, this makes more sense to me when I think about my life and the way I experience the people, places, and events of my world.  

When I reflect on my life, a series of events play out, turning points along the way, each seemingly having nothing to do with the other. Unrelated events, not the time, or the place, or the decision I made in the moment, to go left or right, to go or to stay a moment longer, and yet… 

There they are, inextricable moments in time where my life path converged with some other complete strangers' and in that moment of our meeting; our lives would never be the same again.

These times seem to come with no advance notice and no seemingly repeatable system to identify when or where this convergence is going to occur.

It seems to me that my life radiates outward from a single point of origin. I call this livingly spherically. I can peer into my past from the center of my life seeing things through the lens of my present and therefore the way I view my past has changed, and in the same way the experiences I’m having right in this moment are changing my ideas of the future.

There are people and moments in time, decisions I’ve made, though perhaps not the ones I would have thought, and places that I have lived that have changed me profoundly… When I peer into the depths of my existence it seems they are at my core.

Upon review of the meaningful encounters with strangers whose presence then changed me forevermore, I can see no real pattern. But I am left with a sense of wonder and awe and total utter reverence for the random kindnesses of life.  Just when you need it most, these once unknown people, become major characters in your life story. Just when you were about to give up hope, and write everyone off in the whole world, a new character is ushered into the scene and everything changes. 

When I go back in time through my memories it becomes difficult, impossible even, to remember who I was just before the moment in time when that person came into my life and who I became immediately upon knowing them. There was a time that I didn’t know that person and so I must have been different then, but now, I can’t remember who I was before I knew that person.  

I can recall where I was when I met that person but I can no longer recall who I was before I met them. It seems to me that from the moment of now, I was always to know that person, because without them I wouldn’t be who I am today.

Sometimes these people are just a memory that I carry around with me. I haven’t seen or spoken to the person in years, decades even, and yet their presence in my life is no less real, no less vivid, no less impactful. Either they left a long time ago, or they’ve been gone from this earth for sometime, or I we went away thinking we’d return to each before too long, only to be irrevocably changed so much so that we could never return to each other.

I call up a memory of a lover and play it out like I was selecting a scene in a movie. I remember what was said right at that moment, what I was wearing or the smell in the air.

There are people who mean so much to me, I couldn’t unravel their existence from the fabric of my life line without creating a kind of gaping hole that would suck all the light from the surrounding Universes. There would be an inescapable nothingness without them that could not be filled by anyone other than them.

These people have become a part of me. I wouldn’t be me without them.

This is the aftereffect of two spheres intersecting in time, our worlds instantly become different upon encountering each other.

I have wondered, if there was a guarantee to life, would I buy it? If the guarantee told you every step along the way before it happened and of the people who would come in and out of your life and how they would change you, would I want to know? Would I want to know if they stay or if they leave?

Would it make me happier, in the end, if life was mapped to work out just the way I planned it? Or does it add some worthwhile mystery to the experience of living, not knowing how it's all going to go?

You don't know how or when you’re going to meet a person who will irreversibly change your world and how you view your past, present, and future, across all previous memories and boundaries of the mind, for the rest of time. Perhaps this is one of life’s great riddles that makes life worth living.