I was seventeen the night I visited a small pub on the southwest coast, where the scent of saltwater mixed with the damp wood of the docks, made the air feel heavy with stories untold.
The place was alive, filled with the rough laughter of locals and faces carved by the sea.
It felt timeless, like a setting where generations had gathered for the same blend of music, drink, and fleeting moments of connection.
But that night, something felt different.
I couldn't stop looking at a man, who was sat quietly in a corner by himself.
It was the way he was looking at me.
I had learned by that age what the desiring gaze of a man feels like, and not one part of his gaze made me feel that way.
He was older, well into his fifties, with a face weathered in a way that spoke of a life fully lived.
And my attention wasn't drawn out of attraction or curiosity in any ordinary sense.
There was something about his face. It felt so very familiar. Like a puzzle piece I couldn't quite place but knew belonged somewhere in my past.
I’ve always been terrible with names, but I never forget a face.
Faces lodge themselves in my memory with a persistence I’ve come to trust.
This man, with his lined face and piercing eyes, was both unmistakably known and completely mysterious.
I tried to shake the feeling, to focus on the music, the way the sound seemed to vibrate in my chest, the way the crowd swayed together in that beautifully human way.
But he remained there, just within my line of vision, quiet but present. Familiar yet unnamed.
Before we left, I had to ask.
"Do I know you?" I tentatively said.
It wasn’t his answer that unsettled me, but how he said it.
He looked at me, really looked, the way people do when they’re deciding how much to reveal.
And then, with a slight, almost imperceptible smile, he simply said, "No."
But his eyes said something else entirely.
As if he knew something I didn’t.
That experience lingered, tucked away in the folds of my mind for decades until something strikingly similar happened again.
This time, it was at a festival. Not the crazy kind where people are draped in vibrant colours and textures that blur past and present.
Just a lowkey, family festival in my local village.
I was walking through the crowd when I saw her.
She was ethereally dressed, as though she’d stepped straight out of another time.
Layers of flowing fabric, hair coiled in a way that felt both theatrical and utterly natural.
But it wasn’t her outfit that struck me—it was her face.
That same haunting familiarity.
A visceral recognition.
And just like before, it wasn’t simply a resemblance.
It was as though we knew each other.
As though we had shared something, once. Something close. Intimate.
She caught my gaze and held it.
Not in a casual, passing way, but deliberately, with intention.
My breath caught as I stood frozen, locked in that silent exchange.
And then, just as suddenly as she appeared, she slipped into the crowd, vanishing as if she had never been there at all.
I tried to rationalise it.
Just because no one else was dressed that way doesn't mean that she wasn't just a normal festival goer.
But it wasn’t just the face.
It was the feeling.
The same feeling I’d had in that pub all those years ago.
That sense of knowing.
Of recognition without context.
As a therapist, I spend much of my life helping people untangle the narratives that shape their experiences - the unconscious patterns, the symbols we carry.
Memory can be slippery, shaped not just by fact but by feeling, by the stories we need to tell ourselves to make sense of the world.
Our minds are wired for connection, for meaning. We search for faces we know, for emotional echoes, for patterns in the randomness.
And yet, I’ve never been able to fully explain those moments.
Could those people have been spirit guides, crossing my path for reasons I can only guess?
Is it possible we had known one another in another life, some echo of a bond lingering beyond time?
Or is it just what I want to believe?
There’s a tension between what we know and what we feel.
The scientific mind wants to map out the logical, to attribute these experiences to psychological mechanisms - face pareidolia, the brain’s search for familiarity.
But the soul, the part of us that aches for meaning, feels the tug of something deeper.
Perhaps these moments are reminders of the vastness of human experience.
That not everything can - or should - be explained away.
Maybe they serve as mirrors, reflecting the mystery of connection, the sense that we are more than isolated beings moving through separate lives.
Or maybe they are just glimpses.
Invitations to wonder.
I think about that man still, over 20 years later. And the woman, who looked at me in a way that few people have ever looked at me.
Were they simply strangers, carrying their own stories, their own unknowable depths?
Or were they an important part of the fabric of my journey? One that I have yet to understand.
Either way, they stayed with me.
And maybe that’s all that matters.
Not the certainty of who they were, but the way they made me feel. Reassurance of a familiar unknowing.
Awake to the possibility that we are all more connected than we can fully understand.