It's 12:15 and I'm on my lunch break. Power-walking my way up Main Street, I can feel my upper lip breaking out in a film of sweat and the loose strands from my ponytail begin to plaster themselves to the back of my neck. The street is crowded and I watch my feet as I pick my way between businessmen and kids skipping alongside their mothers. It's hot and I'm late. I look up to check the time on the cinema clock and notice, among all the faces, a guy about my age standing a little ways ahead of me. He's stopped and rummaging in his pocket. After a moment, he pulls out a cigarette that's a little bent at the end. His eyes meet mine as he slides it into his mouth. I keep walking. He's wearing a blue suit and a purple tie. His hair is sandy, his collar is loose. We stare at each other the way only strangers are allowed to. When I'm almost a foot away from him, I nearly stop for a moment, a stuttering step. I feel my arms jerk up a bit like I'm about to say something. His eyes follow mine exactly, even as I move past him. The cigarette is still between his lips, dry, unlit.
Hours pass and I am still struck by the utter intensity of this moment. I can't shake it, the prickling in my stomach, or the feeling that I've just met the love of my life on a street I walk down twice a day. The worst part: I'm almost certain I'll never see him again. Chance encounters are the stuff of dreams, these out-of-body moments that turn things upside-down and make the ordinary extraordinary. Not only do they remind you that the universe is wide and full of mysteries, they instill in you a violent anxiety that you've just passed up perhaps the most fateful moment of your life.
Now, this kind of fatalistic, Bridget Jones talk begs the question: what is fate? Like most humans, I prefer to think of fate as this sort of invisible, quivering force that draws little fairy webs of destiny and meaning between people, places and events. However, after my own serendipitous encounters with fate and chance, I've come to realize that fate is often what you make of it.
For instance, one day while sitting in a coffee shop near my university, a guy I didn't recognize came up to me and asked me who I was. He was cute enough and seemed really sweet, so I told him. He then informed me that we had met at a party about a year ago and had talked for a few hours about our favorite bands. After a moment, I began to remember him. We laughed and talked for a minute and he left for class. All day, I couldn't stop smiling and I had this bubbly feeling in my stomach, like something good was going to happen. I just couldn't believe he remembered me (let alone what my favorite bands were), a year later. As it turns out, this was only the beginning of our dance with fate.
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That same night, my roommate dragged me to an apartment party hosted by a girl I didn't know. I didn't even want to go to this party and tried my best to make up excuses about my killer workload and the cold I was surely getting but she wasn't having any of it. Sure enough, as soon as I walked in the door, I saw the guy from the coffee shop. We ended up spending the night talking about everything you could possibly imagine and only separated when his ex girlfriend saw us and interceded. The very next Friday I saw him at yet another party and we finally exchanged numbers, had a heart-to-heart and had our first kiss at four a.m. in the light of my apartment door.
Needless to say, I was convinced it was meant to be. I envisioned the rest of our time in college together, the dates we would have, the concerts we would go to. I felt like I had known him for years and every cell in my body was telling me: this is right. And yet, in the end, it wasn't. We went on a single date and occasionally saw each other out, but ultimately the relationship didn't work. I was devastated when I first realized my cosmic love wasn't at all fate but rather happenstance. We were never meant to be together, we simply thought we should be and, unfortunately, that wasn't enough.
This might seem like the opposite of a happy-ending story, but it's actually not. I learned a lot from my one-time dependence on the laws of fate. The best lesson: don't put all your chips on a chance encounter. Sometimes it's better to give the person you've known for a while a chance rather than decide the guy you just saw at the grocery store is destined to be your soul mate. That being said, there are tons of instances where people really do see their chance encounters with love turn into strong, lasting relationships, and I applaud them. My advice: keep your heart open and the universe will listen. Maybe I'll meet the guy from Main Street again and, this time, I'll say hello.
Video: The Chances Of Finding The One
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