Take people in love, for instance. Say, Harmony. When she first told me about KKR, she described him to be Death by Chocolate meets Sex on Legs. When I actually saw him, he turned out to be a rapidly balding, mildly obese, wildly gyrating horror-on-the-dancefloor, who to me, looked unbelievably like an African Warthog. Now, I can bet that both our versions of him are not even remotely representative of his actual self, which by the way is also my point.
I do it ALL the time too. I routinely fall in-and-out of love with random people, who if I know just that tad bit longer, makes me see them in this entirely new way, begging the question as to whether they were always that hideous, dumb and boring or if it was just me.
Okay, lets suppose that's just the novelty wearing off because its new and unfamiliar mindspace. But what about what I started with, not really knowing someone at all when in fact you assumed you knew them best. Say, as a wife would about her (cheating) husband. A mother about her (gay) son. A girl about her (back-stabbing) best friend.
When you find out you don't, you wonder if they've changed so much, beyond recognition. If you knew them at all. Or worse, if it was you all along that kept making them up in your head just the way you wanted them to be.
Or maybe that's all nonsense, and it's like Eliot writes in the Cocktail Party:
Ah, but we die to each other daily
What we know of other people
Is only our memory of the moments
During which we knew them.
And they have changed since then.
To pretend that they and we are the same
Is a useful and convenient social convention
Which must sometimes be broken. We must also remember
That at every meeting we are meeting a stranger.
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