The Thrift Store
It was a beautiful spring in the year 2012. Our thrift store located downtown was open for one year already. For me it was a side project, next to my normal job. I usually went early to work at the office for the multinational company, so that each afternoon I could spend time with the staff of our shop in order to manage open questions and new topics.
One of these afternoons, I arrived at our shop and I saw a beautiful lady sitting outside on a bench at the neighbour shop, which was a clothes store for eklektik and colourful style. The next few weeks, when I came to our shop in the afternoon or on the weekend, sometimes I spotted that woman again sitting there and smoking a cigarette.
I was quite shy at that time and thought about her a lot. Ok, i just have seen her appearance but it made me fall for her. During the years from 2006 to 2015 I had no luck when I started to approach girls that I felt attracted to. So I developed a method, in order to work out that outer experience of the girls, that sucked me in. I spent usually around a whole day by taking a good portrait photo of the potential lady, and I was painting the woman’s portrait on a canvas. First by using a pencil and rubber for corrections of proportions, later coloring it by using acrylic colors, water and brushes.
With the lady of the clothes store, who seemed to work there as a shop assistant it was just very difficult for me to find a portrait at all. I did not know her name, so I could not search the internet for portrait photos of her. On a social network, I was browsing all photos of that neighboring fashion shop to check if maybe the shop assistant would have been following one of the pictures. I needed the whole summer, of course not full time, but in the end of the summer I came up with a photo, where I thought that must be her. I showed my discovery of that photo to the store manager of our thrift store, who I already told about my new unanswered love. I was already showing a lot of other photos to our staff, but with this photo she agreed that it could be our neighbouring shop’s shop assistant. Best was that below the photo on the social media, there was written: Model: Her Name.
With this new information I searched the internet for her name and I found a lot of beautiful photos of that lady. One portrait was very special, so I decided to take this photo as my source for painting her. The next weekend, I spend a day or two, in order to finish this painting. When I brought the painting to the store, I used to present the painting outside of our store with the wish that during a break, the neighbouring shop’s assistant will walk over and look at her portrait. Of course that never happened. The only thing that happened because I still was too stoopid to talk to the woman I have fallen for, was that our thrift store moved to a different area of downtown. After the move, I never saw the beautiful lady again.
Time passed and millions of things happened in my life. For example in 2015 we decided to close the thrift store. We had a good time with our shop, but somehow it did not make sense anymore to keep it up and running.
The Law of Attraction
In 2016 I had a drink with a musician friend of mine. We usually had conversations in german, because it was our strongest common language that time. He told me that he started to work as a customer service agent for a multinational company. Although he had no idea about jobs like this, they employed him because of his strong german language background. Sometimes when he had his Sunday shift, he was not very busy at work, so we decided to have phone calls on Sundays, when he needed to stay alone in the office but was only 20% needed to focus at work. They did not have much going on each Sunday.
One of these phone calls, he told me about a colleague of his. A woman, who speaks very good german, is an ex-model and very kind and beautiful. He told me about his plans to have a drink in a bar, that she recommended to him, where there are also German owners, and he asked me to join.
The other day, all three of us met at this bar that I never visited before, and we were sitting at the upper floor and getting to know each other. He introduced us to each other. Suddenly my friend excused himself, he wanted to go home more early. So I had a very nice evening with that lady. She was really beautiful and kind and had a very strong german language knowledge, just a very small interesting accent.
She told me about her past and her plans for the future, just like I told her about my past and my current life, just like two people who get to know each other. We spent the whole evening together in that bar. I really enjoyed that evening. We needed to leave around midnight.
When I was already in bed at home, I was thinking about that evening and I could not get her out of my mind. Before I could fall asleep, I wrote an email to my friend to tell him that this lady is a very sweet person and that I really wanted to thank you.
During the next morning I suddenly had a flash of inspiration. She mentioned her name the last evening in the bar, not only her first name, but also her last name. Somehow I remembered that her name is the same name which was written below the photo that I found in the social media way back in 2012: Model: Her Name.
I wrote a note to my friend, that everything is much more interesting than i thought, but i need to tell him that on a phone call. In our next phone conversation that happened one week later, I told him about this co-incidence and he right away asked Her Name for her phone number. I wanted to meet her again and tell her this story about the painting that I did 4 years ago, and now I met the person that I painted without knowing her before. Maybe I forgot to mention that the neighboring shop’s assistant was most likely another woman, that looks just very similar to Her Name.
But my musician friend somehow convinced me that I should instead call her and tell her that story more early than late. So in the end I called her from a public phone booth. I was using my mobile device in that phone booth and I told her the story of how I could tell it from memory and being nervous about how she would react. In the end she was somehow not even positively surprised but a little bit disappointed about this.
So in order to meet the nice german talking lady again, I spent a lot of time in her favourite bar, which was a good strategy. I needed to be patient for 3 weeks and then I saw her again in that place. She came over to me and told me how sad my story is. I was totally disappointed, and yes in this case it is a very sad story if she thinks it’s a sad story. She touched me gently on my shoulder and said goodbye. I did not know if i should feel sad or happy.
The next day I somehow went again to the bar of the german owners. Her Name came to my table and we agreed that this story is super sad and we never met again.
Tonight I had a dream about Her Name. When I was awake I needed to write an email to my musician friend about how I am quite sad suddenly, close to tears.
It is a beautiful spring day, the birds are singing melodies, and I see downtown from a viewing point up on a hill while typing the last characters.
I wish I could meet Her Name again, she is very kind. Most likely this will never happen again.
