"Soul Mates"

That's what they called us. In our small, very insular high school, I was classmates with this girl. She was tall, slim, and had long curly hair. I was fat. That kind of summed up the sight of us.

Except there wasn't much to see. You see, every school year the administration jumbles up every class section. You end up with different classmates every year. Sometimes you like them. Sometimes you don't. Some are blessed with the best basketball teams, and others have the pieces for a killer choir.

I had that girl, somewhere, in the corner of every seat plan. Every year, without fail,. we were in the same class. Every year, I was far in the back row, and she sat far to the left. We said hello in the hallways. We were professional about school were. It was friendly, if anything.

"Soul mates," is what they called it in high school. Maybe only 8 or so students are so "lucky" to be put together like that, from the randomness of class listing.

But we weren't friends, not any meaningful way anyway. We were never seatmates. We didn't really talk much. She was from the north, from a province that I knew little to nothing about. I was from here, in the capitol. She stayed in a the dorm on campus. I lived something like an hour's drive away. We had not a lot to talk about, and very little in common.

Today I saw her on Facebook. She's married. She has 2 children. She lives overseas, I heard. To this day, I still can't be bothered. I still don't go and say "hi," or try to "catch up."

Nobody asks me, nobody prompts me, nobody suggests that I look deeper and ask, "What if?"

What if I tried to be nicer?
What if I tried earlier to start a friendship?
What if from there, we had become closer?

I guess I'm writing this because there are so many people we meet in our lives. We pass them in the streets, or greet them when we go to work. They serve us our coffee, or clean our floors. We never go about trying to know them better.

Yet we always talk about "meeting new people," and "making friends," when there are people all around us we don't notice, until much later.

And more worryingly, do we lose out on the people we could come closer to? The Soul Mates of cheesy romance novel variety? Do we miss out on meeting them, because somehow we already know them? That we gave up trying to be brave, and be warm?