I know you

What does "I know you" mean?

Is it that I know your darkest secrets? Does it mean that I know what you like and dislike and your odd spectrum of preferences? Or does it mean that I know how you would react in a particular situation when you seem unpredictable to everyone else?

"You don't know me", "You don't know him/her like I do", "I know you better than you do" are commonplace phrases typically full of emotions but I somehow fail to catch its intrinsic meaning. Is this to be quantified and compared? What if I know one of your secrets and somebody else knows another of your secrets, now who knows you better? (The one who knows the less popular secret?)

Does the time have an impact? I've been with you a long time, I've seen you grow up, I've observed you at your lowest point in life, and I've been at your funeral. Is it impossible to know you if I've missed one of these phases of your life? 

You and I, our bond is a congenital disease but if I decide to end my life today, a hundred guesses may not suffice for you to find out the real why.

I could be waiting for you, eager to share the newest and most existing turn of events in my life but you might only see a garrulous immature child with all the wrong priorities.

Do you know me because you are the first to find me in a group photo. Or you can identify my voice across the busiest streets? You could shake my hand and from the temperature, pressure and the texture of my sweaty palms, you would know if I'd accomplished my futile mission. It still intrigues me that if I'm found missing in a forest, the search party would trust a sniffer dog to know about my whereabouts before you, although you've unfortunately breathed more air with my scent.

Tracking my scent may be a trivial factor to judge how well you know me but what does it mean to know me without my attributes. If I'm more than adjectives and nouns, then maybe verbs would do the job, therefore what I do defines me. 

If knowing what I have done is how you know me, then you would have an amazing memory, moreover a lot of time to spare to be with me always thereby beating my diary to record my day and night. From my history you might derive facts; you will eventually transform from a biographer to a historian whereas I would be your subject and then your legend, whom the world has forgotten. You'll have my perspective of my life unless you decide to accompany me from the beginning to infinity and beyond, to get the facts straight. After collecting the facts, you correlate events and try to answer many questions which start with "why". When you have all the data and answers to those questions, will you know me?

Maybe it's what I would do, instead of what's in the past, that you predict my actions that proves you know me. That way eventually you'll turn into an effective behavioural scientist. You wouldn't be surprised when the whole world is shocked upon learning what I have done because you knew the inevitable. You are always a few steps ahead of me if you are my adversary, and you are my best advisor if we are on the same team, but either way, do you really know me?

Maybe it's knowing how I feel. When I yawn a bit longer, you know that I'm not sleepy and take the cue to halt the social interactions. When I smile so bright with excitement yet you realise that my adrenaline level has nosedived a while back. When I hear a dreaded news, our hearts beat in sync. You completely empathise with me but do you know me?

Measuring the depth of an ocean from a perilous boat rocked by the wildest storms could be more feasible than quantifying how much I know you.

By when I know the whole of you, I'll have known the universe. I might even correlate the splitting of atoms in a galaxy light years away with your behaviour but even with that knowledge, still fail to predict with confidence that you'll like a Christmas gift - a decision which I put all the time and effort to finalise. 

How desperately I want to understand you; to manipulate our world for happiness sake. Maybe the peace from giving up this pursuit of knowing you and merely appreciating you for who you are, outweighs the satisfaction of getting to know you better. I shouldn't care about what you've done, what you would do, how you feel, your history, or your dreams. I don't need to know why you did what you did, why you are in this emotional state, why you choose to be you. I needn't have opinions about how you could be more than what you are, that some corrections are due in your habits, or that you deserve something. 

But somehow I want to know you even though I am not sure what it means.