Serendipity

Serendipity


Its April, a friend of mine is dropped off at my apartment by some guy in a van, that’s all that happened. A person I did not meet, see, nor learn his name entered my life unknowingly. My friend simply mentioned he caught a ride home from a guy driving through, a friend of a friend. Nothing more was said, but the moment is etched in my brain with exquisite detail. I know what I was wearing, what I was holding. I remember the way the sunlight looked in the room. It’s so vivid.

Fast forward several months to late summer. I’m sitting on Main Street sipping coffee and reading. A pal passes by and stops to chat … he mentions he’s looking for a place to stay. A friend is moving out, they’re getting a place together. I offer him good luck with the apartment search. That’s it. No name mentioned, no details, no connection made. But once again the memory of this seemingly inconsequential chat is like a photograph. I can smell the coffee I was drinking, describe precisely what I was wearing, and tell you the book I was reading. Again, so vivid.

Have you experienced this? Every detail is frozen in time, but just for an instant. It wasn’t apparent that anything happened. I was unaware that an impact, a memory, was made.

Fast forward again; he’s living in Telluride now. I walk into a cool downstairs restaurant. I’m not even fully out of my coat and I see him, stopped dead in my tracks. I didn’t know who he was, we hadn’t met, but I couldn’t take my eyes off him. Then, finally, the introduction. I fell in love with him that very instant.

It was much later that these moments came together for me. Each connected to something significant that was finally understood, our inevitable meeting. Serendipity. In the first moment, though we didn’t meet, we were no more than twenty feet apart. I was inside a second floor apartment, he was in a van on the street below my window. He barely stopped before driving off. In the second moment he is in the midst of packing his things to move to Telluride. We are 2,000 miles and eleven states apart. We have never met, but we are already connected. And in the third moment, when I finally lay eyes on him, I fall in love.

A toast to serendipity; and a toast to the love of my life.