electric mist

i am not sam

I remember wanting desperately to have been a twin when I was growing up, and I kept looking for secret evidence that maybe I was adopted and there was a sister out there somewhere, someone who was just as weird as I was and just as different from the rest of my family. It probably didn't help that I was born in June, a Gemini, and one of my aunts told me on my fourth birthday that Gemini meant "twins" and I misunderstood her to say that I actually was a twin. I was so very very disappointed when Mom showed me my birth certificate.

When I was a freshman at college, though, I started having a strange set of people coming up to me with, "Hi, Sam! Are you going to English?" or "Hey, Sam -- you going to the party at the Deke's tonight?" The first few times it happened, I thought it was some sort of freshman hazing joke and I generally looked at the speaker like they were a loon and went back to whatever I was doing. One guy followed me all the way across the Quad one time because he'd apparently asked Sam (Samantha) out and she'd said to check with her the next day. He wasn't buying that I wasn't Sam until I showed him my driver's license. He was more than a little shocked and proclaimed we had to be twins.

I figured he'd had waaaaaaaaaaaaaay too much to drink at whatever party he'd met this poor girl and anyone with brunette hair would have looked familiar to him. Then my friends started getting annoyed with me, saying, "Hey, I shouted at you in the bookstore and you just kept walking!" or "Hey, what was wrong with you yesterday? I tried to wave you over to join us and you just kept on going." Etc. I explained to them that it wasn't me they'd seen and most of them probably thought I was just having a bitchy day and didn't want to own up to it.

About a week or so later, I was flipping through The Reveille (LSU's newspaper) and there was an ad for a hair salon and in it, was me. Moi. Same hair, same color, same cut, same face, same eyes, same body. Me. Mirror image. Except I hadn't taken the photo. I studied that photo for a couple of minutes, wondering if someone had taken a candid when I wasn't looking and just used it for the ad, but there were a couple of subtle differences. Then a guy standing near me saw the ad, saw me and said, "Hey, so you're a model?" He didn't believe me when I said that it wasn't me and called me a stuck-up bitch because obviously, being a model had gone to my head and if I didn't want to give him my number, I could have just said so.

Sam was starting to give me a headache.

It happened often enough through the rest of the semester that anytime someone strange approached me and just started talking as if we knew each other, I'd interrupt quickly with, "I am not Sam." I was very curious about her, and yet... she had to have known about me, too, because they surely went back and told her... and neither of us did anything to contact the other. It probably boiled down to not having anything to say, really, except, "Hey, give me back my face," but I wasn't overly fond of it anyway, so it didn't matter.

The next semester, a couple of people came up to me saying, "Sam! I thought you'd moved!" and I'd have to explain again that I wasn't Sam. I had started regretting not actively looking for her, just to satisfy my curiosity, but by then, I figured it was too late. I would tell people who greeted me as "Sam" to please tell Sam that Toni said hello.

Every once-in-a-while when I go into a local business, I'll get greeted like a long lost friend, with people exclaiming, "Sam! You moved back!" and I'd have to explain again. I have no idea where she went or why, or anything about her, and I now wish I'd found out. I know everyone is said to have a doppelganger, but it started to seem like I really was related to this girl. It happened again this weekend, some hmmmmmufflemufflehmmm years after college.

I just laughed and said, "I am not Sam. But if you see her, tell her Toni said hello."

What would you do if you heard someone looked just like you? Would you want to contact them? Get to know them? Or not care?

Posted by toni at December 7, 2004 02:42 PM