My Doppelganger
Marc was a junior in high school when I was a senior. We looked so much alike (and had similar first and last names) that people got us mixed up all the time. My teenage years were punctuated with total strangers around town engaging me in confusing conversations thinking I was him. Some were unconvinced and quite angry when I insisted I wasn't Marc, as if I was being a smart ass, and eventually I had to pull out my driver's license to shut them up.
I like to think Marc had similar problems, but I never found out since we had different social circles and didn't really know each other. In fact, we failed to exchange a single word with each other before graduation.
Two summers later the old gang was back from college and at a friend's birthday party experimenting with random cocktail recipes. I, myself, was quite inebriated when suddenly Marc appeared. He looked exactly the same as he did (and I did) two years ago – clean-shaven and short brown curly hair. I, however, had a bit of a misguided identity reboot in college and since mutated into a skinny, bearded, mullet-headed freak.
With the standard teenage social stigmas far behind us, and my inhibitions further weakened by alcohol, I felt the pressing need to have a word with Marc once and for all. I abruptly approached him, grabbed both his arms, and shouted in his bewildered face:
"You're my clone! You're my CLONE! YOU'RE MY CLONE!!!"
He kinda just laughed it off as somebody pulled me away from him. And that was the only conversation, however brief, we really ever had. Recently I did some cyberstalking to see whatever happened to Marc. Turns out he also left our home town 3000 miles away and ended up also living here in the Bay Area. In fact, not very far from me. And he's also a professional computer geek. Goddammit.