Meeting The Other Me

Yesterday, I finally met the other me. I've known about her for some time now, but we'd kept missing each other at the pharmacy where we both get our mutually-exclusive prescriptions filled.

I first learned about the other me several years ago when I appeared to claim a new prescription, and Cheerful Pharmacist Chickie-Boo—believe me, it's appropriate—launched into a story about her.

"You've got the EXACTLY same first name," she said, "and your last names are very similar."

"That's odd," I said. I didn't really care at the time, being more concerned with the potential interactions of my new prescription with old ones.

"I had to check several times before I saw the difference," she went on, shaking her head as she shook a few pills out of the bottle for my inspection.

That wasn't, apparently, the first time our pharmacy tried to pass my meds to her—or mine to her—and it wouldn't be the last, either. Which puts on the board yet another point in favor of these annoying "consultations" with the pharmacy, and given my general paranoia, I'm surprised I didn't get a chill when the pharmacist so chipperly told me about the other me's fairly narrow miss with meds she didn't need.

After that first, casual fly-by of a non-meeting, I became occasionally accustomed to peripheral encounters with the other me, and her medications. It didn't happen every month, but it did happen often enough that I was not at all surprised by it.

"No, that's the other me," I'd say nonchalantly, although I'd say my first name instead of "me," and then spell out my last name again, more S-L-O-W-L-Y this time.

But yesterday, as I stood all spaced-out in line with a lot of other inattentive Friday-night prescription-picker-uppers, it so happened that the other me was in line right behind me. And she had such a hearty laugh that I'd swear now she had to have been snickering when I oh-so-routinely spurned her medication, but I didn't hear her, or even really look at her, until I was tucking my wallet back into my purse, and she stepped up beside me and I heard that laugh for the first time.

And she said, "I'M the other me."

I looked up in shock, and she smiled at me.

"Oh, HI!" I blurted, my self-unassurance inexplicably absent. "It's really nice to finally meet you!"

And it was nice, I thought, there in the mundane, unhealthy environment of the pharmacy, to be surprised by someone whose name—something that seems so unique, but isn't, really—was so close to mine, and yet I'd never know if I passed her on the street. It made me consider that similarities can be as superficial as differences, and yet, a good joke of fate can be easily recognized.

To judge by the goofy grin the other me shared with me before I turned, still smiling myself, to leave, she got it, too.