This Woman
There is this strange phenomenon that whenever I come across a woman who resembles this one woman I cannot forget, she seems to pierce me with her glance, she seems to recognize me even though it is impossible.
The first time this happened to me was at the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in Jerusalem in early 2019. I was walking through a hallway when I cast a glance into a room and shuddered at the sight of a young woman who, at the distance of about 20 meters, looked exactly like that one woman.
She looked at me fiercely, as if she recognized me from somewhere. There was no way she could have been her or that she knew me, but still her attention was all on me, as if she was asking:
“How come you seem so familiar to me?”
It was too creepy for me, so I just kept walking.
Maybe she was just asking: “How come you stare at me like this?”
Then, last month, I saw a girl on a beach in Portonovo, Galicia, who reminded me a lot of that one woman, even though or especially because she was wearing a mask.
As I was giving flight lessons to kids she came closer and closer and eventually joined the group of kids, as if there was something magnetic about me, as if she was not sure if she knew me from somewhere. After a while she went back to continue reading her book, but from time to time she looked back towards me and the group of kids. I never saw her again.
Then, two days ago, I was riding my bike out of a tunnel close to the city of Horten, Norway, when a young woman was coming down into the tunnel on her bike. She also utterly reminded me of that one woman and I believe that our encounter was so fast that it's impossible that the look on my face could have changed so fast that the look on her face was simply mirroring mine. She looked at me as if I'm someone she knew, as if she recognized me from somewhere, as if there was something special about me.
Is that always just my own perception mirroring on these women's faces? Are mirror neurons that freaking fast? Or is there some other obscure connection between all women with a face similar to that woman? What is that creepy interaction and why is it that I can't forget this special type of face?
I guess the reasons are all to be found in psychology, but still, to me this feels very odd.