A different life in a parallel universe

A girl emailed me yesterday. She was never my friend, but I used to know her a long time ago when I was doing my first degree and I lived in Crete. She was a nice short girl with very white skin and very short pitch black hair. I knew her because we were "fighting for the same cause", we were asking our university to leave a building in the centre of the city for the cultural teams. I was involved in the student magazine and and the music team and I don't remember what she was doing. She was hanging out with a guy we called the Doctor. I think he was studying medicine and was smoking a lot of weed. I was a bit scared of him, he din't talk a lot and he wes tall with a shaved head.

One day there was tension between students and the police and the girl who emailed me, let's call her Eleni, got beaten up by them. All of us heard, so I went to see her. You could see it on her face, they had beaten her up. I felt so weird, I was ashamed to look at her because I hadn't gone to that march. I don't think I talked to her too much after that.

Years later I heard she was in Scotland, doing a PhD in philosphy and some of my friends knew her. Yesterday, she emailed me saying she saw my email by accident in the webpage of the University that I work for. She said she was not sure it was me. She said she was in Dublin. "I hope you're well" she wrote.

I was extremely happy she emailed me. I felt connected with a time that feels a million years away. I felt connected with myself, of that time. My life in 1999, it feels like a different life in a parallel universe. How do people change so much? Do people change so much?

I want to remember that person. I am the same in so many ways but so different. I don't have any pictures from that time and I wish I did, I wish I could see myself back then, I wish I could see if I would recognise me.