Ten years ago in May of 2004, I carefully set aside my library card and a few trinkets for the new girl.  She was taking over my room at my host family's home, a room that had been my luxury suite for nine months. I felt a combination of kinship for my fellow country-woman and jealousy that she got to live in "my" room with a view. We exchanged a few nice emails on sundry topics and I noted her name and initials - the same as mine!

Two years later in 2006, I was in graduate school (my happy place), looking at a list of students registered for a field trip. My eyes scanned the page for my name and did a double take...it's her! We met and spent the day walking around Montreal together. I admired everything: her tan, blond natural beauty; her friendly, easy way and Southern charm; her positive, fresh outlook; her double layered tank top + ruffled brown skirt. We spent two summers together and then lost touch but I never forgot her kindness in 2007 when that same place became my unhappy place.

Early this year 2014, I got a big idea and the sense that I should reach out to her. It turns out, for the past 12 years, she's been attending the same church I "go" to from all the way up here in New England. Somehow, two girls, same age-ish, same initials, from totally different starting points - North, South - wound up nearly connecting abroad, actually connecting in graduate school, then reconnecting in ways still unknown. We slept in the same bed, ate off the same plates, rode the same bus, walked the same paths. Like sisters in a rotating line-up, I went before her, at first, but now I'm sure that she goes before me.