Not as brief an encounter as the other stories, but I will never see her again. I met a girl when I moved to a new school and I developed a bit of a crush on her. She didn't really reciprocate the feelings but was nice enough to remain friends with me that year and I grew to appreciate her a lot as a platonic friend with whom I could just hang out with.
Come freshman year, we started to talk more and I felt as if we were good friends. The closest we got was on a Model UN trip. She and I were in the same room as Venezuela and Australia respectively. We decide to get lunch and just forego sitting with everyone else at "team lunch;" instead we sit by ourselves and just talk in that teenage way where you really have nothing to say but want to keep talking to someone. We continued to do that let-everyone-else-do-their-thing-and-we'll-do-ours thing and it's all very casual. After closing ceremonies of the conference, an older competitor who was competing against me pulled me aside and just told me, "Australia, it's no secret you're into Venezuela. Go get her, man, she obviously is into you too." And that was that.
With newfound morale, I decide I'm going to ask her to homecoming- and then some guy asks her. She says yes, they date, but then they break up (the same time I broke up with my girlfriend on another part of campus, strangely enough). After that, I didn't really see much of her. She ended up dating a senior at the time with whom I was friends with and we were in the same 9-person group on a camping trip our class took for a week, but after that year, she left our school.
I never really thought about her until I ended up drunk-texting her number one night the summer before senior year asking if it was still hers. To my surprise, it was and we were able to arrange a day to hang out with another mutual friend of ours. It was our old friend group from 8th grade coming back together again- it was nostalgic and wonderful. At the end of the night, I drove her home and that was that. No long goodbye, no awkward staring-into-each-others'-eyes-to-kiss, nothing. I didn't expect any of that either, it was just two friends saying bye after a night of hanging out.
Come September, I find that she's deleted all of her social media accounts and her number is disconnected. No one else can get in contact with her and it seems like she's disappeared off the face of the earth. It's not like she was super important to my life, but it's not like I was apathetic towards her either. The fact that I saw her that one last time before she vanished and she didn't say anything to us, especially me, bothers me a lot. Her mom is a mutual friend of some of mine and I once checked to see if there were any traces of her, anything to prove that she was still alive, but nothing. Pictures of her other daughters exist, but not hers. It was like she never existed.
A, if in the unlikely event you're reading this, I hope you're doing well and hope you'll think to give us a call or something sometime.