I did a gap year to Australia after high school, and in the months before I had to go to the travel agency where I saw this guy I had never met before chilling in the waiting room with me. A few weeks later I see the same guy in the line to get passports renewed. A few months later I see him at an airport in San Francisco (a layover to Australia). A day later we're sharing a van with other backpackers to a hostel. It's at the hostel where we have our first conversation, and he seems cool enough. Bookings has placed us in the same room, where we share the same bunk bed. I take a couple of bus rides in the morning and decide to hit up a random breakfast joint...he's there. We hang out for a few days; he's nice but not really my type of person (and I don't think he was really feeling me either) so I'm relieved when we go our separate ways.

A week later, we bump into each other at another hostel. A month later I'm watching TV with some greasy 20-year olds when I hear his voice...we share a bunk bed again. A little later I run into him on a path in a National Park. This pattern continues for my entire stay where we just run into each other at popular backpacker joints and at random places (i.e. ringing him up during my stint working at a supermarket). It's not shocking, backpackers generally have similar trips, and we did go through the same travel agency (explains the timing). It gets increasingly more awkward, especially because as I get to know him more I like him less and less (and the feeling was definitely mutual). It was becoming apparent that he was a bit of a hipster douchebag, and when he called himself a post-marxist, non-canonical anarchist I was just white-girl done with him. I was afraid that he thought I was a crazy girl stalking him, though if not for the look of anxiety/exasperation that crossed his face every time we ran into each other I would have thought he was stalking me.

We end up sharing the same long flight home, awkwardly avoiding eye contact, and I am relieved to think I might have lost him on the layover. One the way home driving back from the airport we hit some traffic, and I look out the passenger side window to see his cringing look (complete with a constipated, tight smile) reflected back at me from the car next to us.

Summer ends and I start Uni, and shocking development, he shares most of my classes. I run into him everywhere on campus and it's exhausting. It makes sense in a way, we were both white kids from a middle-class, liberal background with an itch to travel, so it's not shocking that we had similar travel plans and academic interests. But he's also super different from me personality-wise: he's extroverted, I'm introverted, he's popular, I'm not, he's loud and obnoxious, I'm quiet and meek.

I run into him all the time in the following years, in classes, at parties, once when I was eating a taco in an alley-way (I was waiting for a friend). I find out that he was a waiter at local bar when I stop in, and he finds out that I was a waitress at a restaurant in the same neighbourhood when he brings his date there. I legit hate him now; I find him to be rude, arrogant, annoying, etc. and I know he can't stand me. This kind of shifts one post-grad party I hosted, by this point we share some mutual friends and so he shows up, not realized whose place he was in. It was my place bitch. I decide to extend the olive branch, so I tell our story to our friends, we all laugh about it, and he and I share a joint, and end up kissing for awhile. It doesn't work out and we end up avoiding each other even more. I wonder if, despite my hatred for him, maybe he's my soul mate, or my Wesley Snipes. We even worked together once, briefly as it was my last week there and he was just starting (this was a big city btw). This monday I ran into him at Lowes while picking up fixtures for curtains. We're cool nowadays, though it's still super annoying running into this guy everywhere.