parallel

I hadn't seen Sara in over two years, and in Moscow at that, but it didn't feel like it. She is bright and warm and beautiful. She borrowed a book she loves and which I finished earlier this month (Salinger's Franny and Zooey) in addition to a biography of Brodski. We ate and walked and I told her about the parallel lives I imagine*, and she told me about her future plans. When she was leaving, she offered me her scarf as a gift but I said "no"; "why?"; "because you need it!" She left it on my bed anyway, folded neatly, brown bikes on cyan cloth.

* I don't know if this is an immigrant thing or just me, but I wonder what would have happened had I grown up in Moscow. It's important not to do this too much, otherwise one can go a bit mad. Interestingly, I don't really do it for Israel (though the chance of ending up there is just as real, if not more so). Maybe I would have been a bit more chill, and I know a couple of the people I would know better had I lived there (Ilya whom I met two years ago, and Manya - people used to tell us we look like sisters before she moved to Israel in middle school) but it doesn't seem like I would be fundamentally different. I also haven't been there in a really long time, so perhaps I simply don't have enough information to fantasize.
I also don't really imagine what it would be like if I had gone to Clark University or UMass Amherst (the other two colleges I had been considering for my bachelors), or if I hadn't met the specific part of the Russian-Jewish community I'm part of in 8th grade. It doesn't make sense to, because I can't imagine anything in it's place except misery. 

I think with Moscow it's due to a string of 'coincidences'.
I met a boy Danya from St. Petersburg about a month ago, and he introduced me to his friend, who knew my cousins because they go to the 57th school (it seems that about 50% of the Russian-speakers I know went there). When Andrej came to camp in 2008, I already had been him four years prior in Karelia, and of all the people there, I had made sure to get his address for correspondences (though never wrote to him). In Berlin, I was staying with Sasha and his apartment mates. Mama had a friend through live journal but never met her in person, and this woman knew Sasha had a room. When Dasha Sh. visited me for a day it turned out she knew Sasha's sister. In Moscow I was brought to the same alternative-space by two different people, and it was best put by Varya: this place is widely known in narrow circles. There are others. I may be wrong, there are circles that don't quite overlap. The people I know from MGU who studied mathematics don't know all these people, though Sima is the reason I ended up in Karelia.

And that's where it is: that moment. Some things I have no idea about - how would I have been different had I grown up in a city, specifically Moscow - more neurotic? aggressive? sexually focused? feminine? cruel? educated? What has been lost and what has been acquired by me leading the life I lead, and not the life I don't lead (as Sara noted, there is inevitably a touch of sadness in considering the alternative. like maybe those things are missing from me.)
But some things are fixed. I may not have known the same exact people, but I would have almost known them. Known someone they know or gone to the same space and held the same political and social views. In a world of over seven billion, there are not that many that I could know, even if I had ended up living 4,500 miles away.