Colliding with non-fiction

So, this requires a backstory.

There's a website I'm a member of, on which you can post articles & photos & videos and such. People can comment, and while the majority of content isn't vastly literary in nature, occasionally you find the good writers. I stumbled across one-- a guy not too distant in age from myself. A good writer, who choses to share his little life-stories. Ultimately, his short 'articles' are blogs about his life, but well-written and witty enough to actually catch my eye repeatedly. And occasionally, they have pictures. So I started to keep up.

I knew the guy didn't live too far from my mom's, but over the border in NY-- unexplored territory, for the most part. And the area was a big one, so I never really thought much of it.

Fast forward to this afternoon. I was visiting the NY Renaissance Faire in Tuxedo with some friends of mine. We were wandering around, as is typical at Faire. There was a decent crowd, but nothing spectacular.

In any case, we were walking out of a booth, not going anywhere in particular, when a face caught my eye. Almost instantly, I thought, "She looks like that girl that guy on Gather writes about sometimes." I looked beyond her, to see a guy. I knew that the girl in question is often accompanied by a guy, but I didn't really have a photographic-visual to go on. However, there was a certain physical characteristic that had been mentioned in those stories.

They were accompanied by a third, another girl, and luckily enough, one of my friends knew her and detoured to talk to her. (Turns out, she was also written about by the guy-from-Gather.) I cautiously approached the other two, aware that, whether or not I was correct, this would likely be awkward. Upon nearing the pair, the man opened his mouth, displaying silver teeth. My assumptions had to be correct.

"Um, hi," I started. There was really no non-creepy way to go about this. "This may sound bizarre, but..."

I explained the situation. They seemed confused at first, but seemed to know who's writing I was referring to, even if I didn't name him. We made some small talk, my friend finished talking with the other girl, and we went our separate ways.

My mind was blown.

I knew these people existed, in some capacity, but I was distanced from the stories. I was simply reading them because I enjoy seeing snippets of other people's lives, and Guy-From-Gather wrote well and made his experiences interesting to observe from my little nook across the interweb. I wasn't expecting to actually ever have my life collide in any way with his.

I viewed these people as characters, basically. Maybe I knew they weren't fictional, but they weren't quite real to me, either. I knew little bits of information about them, and in a way, I almost felt as though I knew them, through what I'd read. Talking to them was so bizarre, because I don't really know them, even if I know things about them. And they know absolutely nothing about me.

To have the characters of another stranger's story suddenly show up in your life is unsettling, if sort of exciting.

It got me thinking. How many 'real' people just end up being characters to someone else? Am I a character, spoken of or written about, heard or read about by a stranger that finds me intriguing but never anticipates actually interacting with me? And how many characters have I 'created', out of real friends of mine, for other people to analyze from afar?

I'd like to think that if to some stranger, I'm a character, I'm at least an interesting one.