only the lonely know the way I feel tonight.

Just for the sake of it. While waiting for an occasion that is still 1 hour away, let me translate a piece of mine I had written some (many) years ago (4).

Beautiful People

When you turn 30, you happen to have a circle of people, friends that you see regularly or from time to time and for some weird reason, it gets more difficult each year to add new people to this circle. The fact that, the people around you being really nice and kind doesn’t necessarily reject the existence of beautiful people other than them. And just at this point, there lies -at least for me- a very interesting phenomenon.

There’s this person that you — both happen to be present in the same locations for various occasions; saw as he/she participates in some acts with other people; probably know by name (which in fact you had heard this name when somebody you don’t know called this another somebody you didn’t knew’s) — and you think of this person as a “beautiful person”. If it was in the past, maybe you’d look for ways to meet him/her: shared taste in music or books or just a simple “The weather is such lovely today!” maybe… But, I suspect due to something to do with age and I’m not sure how appropriate it is to call it as “saturation”, but you don’t attend to do anything about this person, the mere acknowledgment of this person as a beautiful person is sufficient for you. You even start collecting and recording somewhere all the random information you acquire about this person as if participating in a game (at this point, I’d like to clarify this recording somewhere issue: what I mean is just a some kind of a mental recording, not an actual, real, weird and scary one!). Anyway, without further stepping outside of the trail, let us return once again to our Michel Butor (Transformation) mode:

…then, one day, you see one of these people you’ve marked as beautiful communicating with another member of your beautiful people category. When you come to think of it, this is very natural since the world is small, -let it be the university, then- the university is small, similar to the fact that the beautiful people you know and share a friendship with have common characteristics, interests, humor, aspect, it is highly possible for the other beautiful people you don’t know to have such/similar common things and thus participate in friendship with each other and the paths to cross. At this point, the location factor steps in: if I had been in the same -let’s say- department, given the chances, I’d also most likely be friends with him/her. Alas, now, we’re just sharing the -for instance- same bus or coming together around a table when there’s a meeting about the computers, etc, etc… I mean, unless one of the parties involved makes an extra effort, there’s no chance of meeting on a regular basis.

I don’t know, this just occurs to me as a strange, mysterious, mystifying and charming at the same. Such a reign of time and location!

A very clear example to this beautiful people phenomena can be given regarding to the best friend of your best friend: imagine that, on one evening, you meet her outside, in a cafe and she has also brought this friend of her ’cause they haven’t met for a while and this friend coincidentally has something to do in the proximity… In times like these, the introduction and the “Hi stage” follows:

- Hi, this is my friend X, and this is Y.
- Hi..
- Hi..

Ironically, just how much potential do these ‘hi’s contain within themselves. But, both sides know that, the possibility of seeing each other again is sooooooo low. Both parties then open up their memory books as they take the note “a beautiful person” placed just next to the person opposite’s face on the same book, which will be lost in a week from now..

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