I was three different people to three completely different people, all within about three and a half hours. Each case of mistaken identity was in a slightly different and rather distinct mode, from the most banal (a wrong number) to the most fantastic (a woman asking, in all earnestness, if I was the scientist she was supposed to be meeting). The other one also bears mention, a man remarking how much I’d changed, only to find out that I wasn’t the changed man he thought I was. Maybe this one is my favorite—from a truly existential perspective. It’s true that I’m not the man I used to be; so he was really right, even if he was wrong about who I was.

Much like when my online bank suggests that I am not Kent, these cases suggest a possibility of bifurcating realities. Or at least simulate that moment we know from certain fictions (by Graham Greene, Rod Serling, and others). And it’s exciting and it’s an open question: why I am not these people (which recalls the opening lines from ‘Wings of Desire).

A brave man might pretend to be those other people. I love a good charade as much as the next person, but I can’t really go that far. I fear the moment of discovery. But I love the moment where I get to imagine that I am that pretender. This is another identity, not mine, not the mistaken one, but the one who can assume these identities. That’s the brave one. Still, who has the knowledge to do that? If I could fein the scientific knowledge, wouldn’t I be the scientist?

I’m talking myself down a messy spiral. I simply want to end on this question: What if we could be those people that other people sometimes mistake us to be? It’s a beautiful and terrifying thought.