Deja Vu

You are Dave Strider, professional photographer, internet celebrity, and the creator of the best fucking series in the world, Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff. But right now you are none of those. Right now you are just another tourist walking along the boardwalk, taking in the beauty of the wilderness. You do not particularly find nature like this to be as appealing to photograph, but something, some ironic tug at your consciousness you think, told you to buy a plane ticket from Texas to Seattle, rent a car and drive to Maple Valley.

And you stuck out like an egg in a snowstorm, not that you know what the fuck that even means. You’re the darkest person in the county, you are sure. Not one of the people who take another look as you pass by ask for an autograph. That doesn’t bother you as much as you thought it would have. It was nice to be able to just be a nobody again.

You lean against the railing for a brief moment, camera in hand and watch the people pass you by. Your favorite pastime, when not doing all the other amazing shit you do, was to people watch. And these Washington people were an interesting bunch.

You push your shades up your nose before you point your camera at a child, no more than two, pointing through the railings down at the water. After a batch of un-ironic shitty photographs clogging up the camera’s memory chip, you continue down the boardwalk.

Your hands are jammed in your pockets, your camera hanging from its strap around your neck bounces against your chest with each step. You walk past a large group of college students and glance at the faces within the group before shifting your eyes away, as if they can see your gaze.

You stop dead in your tracks. Your heart jumps into your throat. Your hands are out of your pockets and on your camera as you turn back towards the group that is further down the boardwalk now.

You don’t know how to explain it. You have never felt such an intense feeling of Déjà Vu before. But that face, that god damned buck-toothed smile, those almost too-large square horn-rimmed glasses. You swear you’ve seen his face before. You know you have seen his face before.

But where, god dammit?

You stand in the middle of the boardwalk, scanning for something familiar, anything to jog your memory.

It’s like you knew him. Like he was some distant friend from your childhood that you grew away from and never really remembered, but you never completely forgot. One that, while sitting in your kitchen eating a bowl of cereal as the dawn breaks, your vision stuck between this world and your deamselfs’, you think about and wonder what ever happened to them and just why you never kept in contact. And there is a name on the tip of your tongue. You do not know where this name has come from and you are pretty sure you have never known this boy, but there is a name and it is right fuckin’ there.

But what is it?

Egg… No, who would be so cruel to name anyone that? But why is that the first thing to come to your mind?

You close your eyes and remember what he looked like. He had dark hair, in a generic style, you remember, and glasses. He definitely had glasses. Square, you think. And he was smiling, buck-toothed, something he could have gotten corrected when he was younger but never did.

Once you’ve got his image burned into your memory, you open your eyes and scan the boardwalk again, hoping that maybe he’d separated from the group and was looking out at the river. But he is nowhere to be found and you are forced to lean again the railing, camera left hanging around your neck, trying to remember.

You stand in the same spot, starring blankly at nothing in particular, well past sunset. But your mind is stuck on Egg-something. You can’t help but keep being briefly distracted by thoughts of a childhood you don’t quite recall, of friends your don’t ever remember meeting (but you know them), of time spent chatting with a buck-toothed boy….

A buck-toothed boy you aren’t even sure really exists.