me and you and everyone we know

once, when i was 19 or 20, i went to see a matinee showing of “me and you and everyone we know” at the E Street Cinema in washington DC, and i hardly remember a single thing about the movie except that i absolutely adored the name of it and that a nervous older man tried to ask me out afterwards on the sidewalk in front of the theater, and i shrugged shyly and told him that i was sorry but i wasn’t interested. oh, and i remember the skirt i was wearing: a blue-and-turquoise, ruffled paisley print which reached down to my ankles.

i also remember one scene from the film, in which the two brothers are talking about something and the older brother draws a diagram of everyone they’ve ever met in their very short lives. he starts out by making two dots, one for himself and another for his brother, on a piece of paper (or was it a computer screen?) and then starts connecting them with lines, and then drawing more and more dots and more lines to illustrate the ever-growing, delicate, spider web-esque network of people. i am fairly certain i saw this scene in that movie, although i am not 100% sure, and i’m not able to find the clip anywhere online now that i’m searching for it.

i was recently reminded of the film title when i stumbled across something on twitter which made my jaw drop at first, although in retrospect i can’t decide whether it was very improbable or rather bound to happen: an account which i follow, from someone whom i’ve never met, posted about having studied with The Astrologer who i used to see over a decade ago. he’d been the one who delivered the kind-but-stark metaphor about Amy “taking out the trash” when she died, and he was also the one whom i followed on a retreat which he co-led with his wife, The Herbalist, as the two of them were first developing their joint business concept. this happened to be around the same time that my marriage was falling apart, and during the mandatory separation year before the divorce i often visited the place where The Astrologer and The Herbalist were building their practice. it was a small house tucked away from the main road which led from my place to theirs, with one purple or blue room filled with books where The Astrologer offered his readings and another room, brightly lit, where The Herbalist developed custom tinctures and teas for her customers, oftentimes to complement a reading they’d done with her husband. It felt good to inhabit a space which was built on their interwoven strengths, a feeling of safety and ease which was so ubiquitous around them but so conspicuously missing from my own home which was just a stone’s throw away. after the divorce was finalized i wanted to flee far away from that old house, and so we quickly sold it and i gradually lost contact with not only The Astrologer and The Herbalist but also many of the friends i had spent time with during that period.

i had always thought of twitter, and especially the particular niche of twitter users i find myself often mingling with, as this obscure, miraculous thing where an algorithm was putting me in contact with people from all corners of the world whom i never would have otherwise come into contact with. i had not, however, considered the possibility that this same algorithm would lead me back to where i started: a place where i, out of very good luck, was never far away from beautiful and mind-opening, unusual things being created and explored and offered to the world.

I remember listening to The Astrologer give a talk once where he said offhandedly that he wished there was a way to show on a map, live at any given moment, the sun/moon/ascending signs of everyone who had congregated in a particular place. He had this theory that geminis tended to gravitate towards each other in certain moments, capricorns in another type of moment, and so on for other permutations of planetary movements and types of human interaction that take place over a lifetime. I wonder if there is a similar phenomenon when it comes to the internet: given the chance to widely disperse and mingle with anyone in the world, including people who we would never encounter in real life due to the limits on our physical surroundings, how is it that we find ourselves reuniting with certain people over and over again over time?

(all I know is that I’m planning to reach back out to The Astrologer)

Photo by Robert Anasch on Unsplash