Me, myself, and Michelle.

You ever wonder what it would be like to be someone else for a day? Like maybe you could slip in and out of the lives of your neighbors, your coworkers, the person standing next to you in line at the grocery store? Would you embrace the opportunity to abandon your identity for a day and take a sample of something different?

Now what if it wasn’t your choice? What if your body had suddenly been switched with someone else’s without warning? What if your identity were plucked away and replaced with a random one, but nobody told you? What if it happened several times in a day, personas cycling like an iPod shuffle, leaving you with no discernable “me.”

I had that day today.

I get this a lot: “You look JUST like this girl I know.” People sometimes stare at me strangely while talking to me, before eventually confessing that they know my doppelganger, and she lives in Sheboygan with two hippies and a dog named Clive. What do you say to this? How do you respond? “Well, there are a lot of us out there.”

Sometimes they’ll even say, “You look just like a girl I knew in college, and what’s more, you speak in exactly the same way, and have the same sense of humor!”

“Oh, that was me,” I say. “But I’m in Witness Protection now, so don’t tell anyone you saw me, ’kay?”

Anyway, today was a strange sort of day in which I was constantly mistaken for somebody else. This morning, a young man approached me and asked me with an excited grin, “Hey, didn’t you go to Millard High School?”

I told him I had not, and in fact, did not go to any high school within a thousand miles of here.

“Oh. So, you didn’t have Mr. Capford for English Lit, then?”

I wondered briefly if he actually expected me to say, “Oh, well, yes actually. I flew in for 6th period everyday.” Out loud, I confirmed that I did not have Mr. Capford, no. Idiot. He meandered sadly away. I felt the littlest bit guilty that I was not what he expected.

Later in the day, while I was at work, I was helping a regular customer find products for her craft project. She kept calling me “Michelle,” which is not my name. I corrected her once or twice, but eventually gave up, and thought about how I could draw attention to my nametag. Maybe I could just sort of “drop” it nonchalantly onto her eyeballs.

On the way home from work, I stopped at the grocery store because my apartment was under a Yellow Alert. I needed toilet paper. I got a few other things as well—mostly high in calories—and went home. When I started emptying my grocery bags, I found a jar of tomato sauce that I had never seen before in my life. I stared at it, baffled, and then did that thing where you look around the room in confusion, even though there is nobody else in the apartment to say, “Hey, why are you looking around in a confused manner?” It was clearly not a jar of tomato sauce that I would ever place in my cart, because it looked like it had the consistency of tempera paint and was large enough to feed most of Southern California. Obviously, the checkout girl had placed this bucket of tomato squish into my bag by accident, and it probably had belonged to the woman in front of me in line. I wondered if she noticed it was missing. I also wondered if the checkout girl really thought that I would need such a large quantity of sauce when everything else I bought tonight was painfully she-lives-alone-sized.

After my groceries were put away, with my new bucket-o-sauce taking up half my refrigerator space, I went out to get my mail. I got a little excited as I saw all sorts of interestingly colored things in my mailbox (the more colorful your mail, the more people love you), but the warm feeling ebbed when I realized they were all addressed to Karen Somebody-or-other. My name is not Karen any more than it is Michelle, and I realized that all of this fun post was meant for the apartment next to me. When I separated out all of Karen’s fun letters and magazines, I was left with a droopy little half-sheet brochure advertising a discount rate on mortgages. I don’t even have a house.

This evening, when the phone rang, I should have known it would be a wrong number. I almost laughed when the voice on the other end of the line asked for “Michelle.” I should have played along and pretended to be a Michelle for a little while. I wonder how long I could have carried on a coherent conversation.

This is one of those days where you just go to bed hoping that the world will straighten itself out while you sleep. It’s an odd feeling to be snubbed by your own identity. It’s rather like my “me” took a day trip to Vegas for some slots and a show, and left my body behind to fend for itself. I hope when I wake up, the “me” will have returned, preferably with a nice double-cherry jackpot and a little plastic Siegfried and Roy.