Special Strangers: FriendCrush

Published April 10, 2007

By Lauren McGonagle-Akin

He was particularly rosy. His shoulders swung like hammocks when he walked. His hands were always in his pockets. He radiated jolliness. He was my trustworthy anonymous Monday-Wednesday-Friday passerby.

Every walk to central campus would surely include a silent and swift encounter with this rosy one and subsequently pleasant musings about him would follow.

I had no romantic interest in this fellow. I knew only that he struck some sort of chord within me, and that his vibe laid the groundwork for some seriously enjoyable internal narrative. He was what I have come to call a “special stranger.”

This is the person you habitually see in passing and never fail to notice. You begin to fabricate a long thread of endearing details concerning this person and eventually piece together an entirely imagined fabric of their being. You NEVER speak to them.

If you have never engaged in spinning a completely unfounded tale of the quirks, childhood adventures, and daily rituals of a total stranger, I suggest you try it out.

I didn’t give much thought to hammock shoulders after 10 in the morning, but he was a brief, three-day-a-week, mental staple of my life. So, you can imagine my profound shock upon walking into my L/L suite to find him on the couch one Saturday evening, engaged in typical drunk chatter with my roommates.

Feeling a little loopy and uninhibited myself, I immediately darted towards him and tried to convey his profound importance to my brain and my mornings. “Do you have any idea who you are?” I asked, wide-eyed and exhilarated. He responded affirmatively by telling me his name. In an instant, he had obliterated his stranger status.

He started hanging around a lot, and the presence of the special stranger was astonishingly anti-climactic; this is to say, we didn’t really hit it off.

There are, of course, variations on the special stranger. The most important sub-stratum is the friend crush. This is the person you have spoken to once or twice, at the very most. You immediately know that you must become friends, but you have no idea whether they share this profound feeling of infatuation.

So you play it cool and wait for that undeniably fated next encounter. Until then you engage in aforementioned “special stranger” mental behavior, with perhaps more turbulent emotional recourse.

Then things get mucky: you haven’t seen them around, you canceled your Facebook account last month in a drunken moment of cultural rebellion, and somehow they become a phantom friend crush. At some point and with surprising ease, you let them go. They become the soul mate that never-was.

College to me has often seemed a sparkling realm of potential soul mates, but what the hell is a soul mate, anyhow? And fate, if you believe that sort of thing, by its very nature takes care of the friend crush dilemma on its own. And in waiting for the big bang holy shit soul mate, if we can ever expect such a companion, open yourself up to the wondrous beings in your 2 mile radius; they could all potentially inspire your special stranger mental fabrication opus. They could all probably use a friend who you know, speaks to them.

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