Seeing an Earlier Sarah.

I was watching a crime drama video on the computer tonight and saw a familiar face on the screen (and heard a familiar voice intoning the requisite lines.) I soon recognised her as an actress I’d known during my time working at the theatre.

She came to my house several times with the other actors to play actory games and smoke actory pot. She rang me a few times to talk about things that were troubling her, such as whether being highly impulsive is a good or a bad thing. She even held my hand on a railway station one cold winter morning. (Heaven knows why; I didn’t ask her to.) She called me the day after my mother died, and when I told her the story of how my mother had waited until I fell asleep (after thirty eight hours of being awake) before passing, she simply said 'What a motherly thing to do.' And I wrote a song for her which she seemed to like.

I worked out from the registration plates on the cars in the drama that it must have been made around twelve years after I’d last seen her, which is why it had taken me a few seconds to recognise her. Time moves apace and people change a lot in twelve years. But her body language, her voice, and her eyes were the same.

I googled her name some years ago and discovered that she’d married some rich bloke and moved to Manhattan. I wonder whether she did it on impulse.

And there she was all these years later, looking at me out of a computer monitor. Her name was Sarah, too. It’s odd how life weaves little repeating patterns, isn’t it?