AlAnoud Writes

I have begun to suspect
that no one is ever a stranger.

We only meet the old
in unfamiliar forms.

In the beginning,
there was a classroom
small hands, bright faces,
names we thought we would remember forever.

And then we grew.

High school arrived
with its new corridors,
new laughter,
new alliances.

Yet somewhere among them
was the friend from first grade
wearing a different face,
carrying a different story,
asking the same old question:

Will you stay?

Then came the university,
and with it a wider world.

New people.
New versions of ourselves.

But there was always someone
who felt strangely familiar
a childhood companion
returned as a stranger,
an unfinished friendship
given another body.

And later, work.

The adult world.

We called them colleagues,
but sometimes they were
the children we once knew.

The old rival.
The old confidant.
The one who misunderstood us.
The one who saw us
before we knew how to be seen.

Even love is not exempt.

Lovers arrive
carrying echoes of people
who passed through us before.

A gesture borrowed from someone lost.
A silence belonging to an old friend.
A tenderness that reminds us
of a person we thought
we had forgotten.

And perhaps this is why
familiarity can feel so much like fate.

Perhaps life does not move
in a straight line.

Perhaps it moves like water
fluid, returning,
taking the shape of every vessel
without ever becoming the same water twice.

We call them new chapters.

But maybe the characters
are recurring.

Maybe existence keeps
changing the names
until we finally understand
the lesson.

The friend returns
as a colleague.

The stranger becomes
the lover.

The lover becomes
the memory.

The memory becomes
the wisdom with which
we recognize the next one.

And every season
brings us another variation
of something we have already known:

a beginning disguised as an ending,
an ending disguised as a beginning,
a wound returning
not to hurt us again
but to ask whether
we have learned how to heal.

Perhaps that is what time does.

It does not erase the past.

It rearranges it.

It takes an old story,
changes the setting,
changes the faces,
changes our place within it

and waits.

Waits to see
if we will repeat ourselves
or finally write
a different ending.

So I no longer wonder
why certain people feel familiar
the moment they enter my life.

Perhaps they are not.

Perhaps I am simply
recognizing something in them
that has already lived in me.

And perhaps every person
we call a stranger
is only an old question
arriving in a new voice.

A new season.

A new face.

The same river.

And us

never quite the same
as the last time
we stood beside it.