The story begins with a friend with a particular name.
That name doesn’t matter and
neither does the friend really.
This isn’t about her.
Rather, it’s about another girl with the same name.

I met this girl at the intersection
of God knows where
and God knows when
where after God knows what
I obtained her phone number,

after which, we completely forgot about each other.
Since, she lingered in my contact list
waiting for the day I wanted to text my friend
and clicked the wrong name.
What a mistake that turned out to be.

In this single thumb stroke of bad luck
I exposed myself as a male stranger
correctly matching her name to her number,
worrying her as one should be in such a case.
I could have been an axe murderer.

What followed was a two hour interrogation about everything:
every job I worked, school I attended,
churches I worshipped, bars I drank at,
family members, close friends, distant friends, everything
except for my debit card and social security number.

No piece of information helped us find God knows where,
the one forgettable time we met.
Of course, it didn’t help that she refused
to offer up even the least bit of information
about herself.

She claimed to have a cop friend
who could run a background check on me.
I told her go for it!
All of his friends could join in the fun,
maybe they could come to my place for poker or something.

Then I pleaded for an end to the misunderstanding.
She could stop texting
and I wouldn’t push, 
but she couldn’t do that.
She had to make sure I wasn’t an axe murderer.

(I did have to wonder at this point,
if I was planning an axe murdering,
what advantage would I gain from texting like this?
Psychological torture? Just getting off? I don’t know.
I’ve never murdered someone with an axe before.)

My final plea was to solely rely
on the simplest answer between us,
that we just didn’t leave lasting impressions on each other.
She gave me her number, I never texted,
we just forgot.

Oh no! she said,
I am way too responsible with myself
to ever give my number to a guy
without knowing when and where
and I would never forget!

I told her I didn’t know what to say then.
We weren’t going to remember anything
and I was surrendering all power to her.
This was somehow disarming enough
that it brought an end to the battle.

After the fact, I was able to laugh with friends about it,
writing it off as just some random encounter.
I asked a lot of people if they knew
a girl by that name.
Nothing.

This would be our only memorable encounter,
but the real sadness was this highlighted human truth;
it was so much easier for a stranger
to accuse me of being an axe murderer
than admit the possibility she might have made one mistake in her life.