Serendipity
Our lives are in a constant state of flux. Changing, ephemeral and transient……
Consistency is but a myth. A comforting little lie we tell ourselves to maintain the illusion that we control our destinies.
Everyday millions of people wake up around the world, and get to the task of organizing their daily life into convenient little categories. Anything that helps them cut through the chaos and ensure routine. What shirt am I going to wear today? What route will I take to work? What am I going to cook for dinner? What time am I going to bed?
We plan, organize, schedule, and time our lives around something….anything. Work, relationships, oven timers, sale windows, TV schedules. Grasping at the straws of anything which seems preordained, constant and unchanging.
Why is that we never pause and think about what we eliminate when we're finalizing on something? That we never account for the things that aren't a given, like wearing that other shirt, or taking that next subway. Where would it have led us to? Would our lives have been ever the same? Could the love of one's life be on that other subway? Could that shirt have made him notice me?
Time and space are not quite as linear as we like to think they are. They're always playing out in a thousand different ways. We just choose to live in that one scenario. Things are forever happening, and as hard as it might be to believe, we are where we are at any point in our lives because of something arbitrary.
If I had to unravel the decisions of my past. I can't help thinking. ……If I would be where I am today. If anything in my life would have been the same. Every step that I've taken and the consequences of it in terms of where it's taken me. The good and the bad turns, all of it.
What if I had made the other choice? The pink blouse instead of the blue, the second apartment, said yes to the cute guy at the bar the other night.
Where would it have taken me? It's not the big things that I worry about…..It's really the small decisions….
That seat in the diner….. I could have picked another one…..any one, in that entire row and I wouldn't have met him that day. We'd have met eventually at the precinct with proper introductions and everything. We'd be friends, good friends…
Just Friends………..
Procedures about missing people are clear enough. You start looking when the stipulated time period is up. A person is 18 or above, that what you do. But something about that troubled mothers' eyes, gave no heed to procedure and in that moment, I knew I needed to help her. I needed to help her even if it meant working around procedure, even if it meant I could be yelled at and hurt my already precarious position as the newbie. There was him of course. He helped me out, fully knowing he'd get nothing from it.
We could have lost three lives that day…………
It was inches, the distance between our lips. The warm air bouncing of each other's pair as we spoke. Should I just have kissed him? Could he have just crushed those lips against mine? My resistance would have broken in an instant. The vulnerability I felt, the chemistry we had and the moment all coming together into something wonderful, something amazing.
Something temporary….
It was a simple invite. Ballpark franks and a boardwalk stroll. Saying yes was just easy despite everything that could go wrong. A split second of weakness, of letting my guard down. It didn't seem risqué and it wasn't. It took us approximately fifteen minutes to finish it, ten if we hadn't been walking. A perfectly ordinary fifteen minutes. He joked, I laughed, and we talked.
Fifteen minutes in which I knew I had fallen for him
Every moment of my life, I've liked to think I knew what I was doing and where it was taking me. I am not so sure anymore. But it doesn't matter.
Our lives are in a constant state of flux. Changing, ephemeral and transient …..
But there is order in chaos, in the little decisions we never give much thought to, the seemingly arbitrary happenings. Even when I don't know where I am going, I know what the end is.
Because every step that I take, knowingly and unknowingly.
It's meant to lead me towards him.
