uniquely you

After she died I found myself searching for someone else who could be her--her smile and the way her hair was always a mess and her laugh. It's been years now and I'm still searching. The hardest thing has been finding somebody with her smile. She didn't smile often, except when I was around. So it was almost my smile, in a way.

For a long time I didn't understand my failure--put it up to bad luck, perhaps, or being in the wrong city. Maybe I was too late, I thought. She would be older now, more mature. A lot can change in a few years. There were a lot of reasons I could have been failing. I never stopped to consider that I was hoping to meet her again.

There's a song with the lyric "I met a hundred people yesterday, and none of them were you." At some point when I was listening to it I realized that she was unique--not because of any special qualities she had, but because everybody else wasn't her. That there was a convergence of forces so intricate and complex that it would never be duplicated again when she was born, acting on every moment of her life--and that it would only be futility to try to reproduce them.

What else could I do? I gave up.