When I plan to meet someone sometime, somewhere, we don’t always follow up in the days or night or hours before. And then, as I make my way over to where we’re meeting, I wonder: Is this actually going to happen? Will the other person be there, or did I imagine this? Do we share the same reality?
And then, I arrive, and the other person’s there, or pulling up next to me, or arriving within minutes, and all I can think is,
Wow.
There are so many little things that have to line up for this meeting to take place. We have to commit to something and remember it (or record it and remember to check the record). We have to experience the same time and have the same understanding of place. We have to have a way to arrive and a desire to be there. We have to have nothing more important happen to make us forget this or to require our presence elsewhere.
I feel the same way about the people I run into regularly in our neighborhood. What an act of faith it is to say, when you really mean it, “See you around.” “See you next week.” Trusting that something will happen because the earth revolves around the sun and the earth rotates on its axis and the moon waxes and wanes and L goes to the park on Tuesdays and J walks with his daughter on Thursdays. And if someone misses a week? There’s the week after. There are chance encounters by the check-out aisles at Trader Joe’s or while shivering in the produce refrigerator at Costco or in whichever aisle is most awkward for you, personally, at Target.
We will meet. We will meet again.
And if we don’t? That’s the actual baseline. That’s what makes all the times we do see each other magical.
Unless we don’t like each other. Then they’re just annoying coincidences.
This Glass Has Water 