Maybe One Day I Will Meet You

And maybe one day I’ll be reading a book at the Laundromat. Some movement will catch my eye and then I’ll see you taking your clothes out of the dryer. That minutes and trials all lead up to us together, somewhere. I’ll get nervous when I see you, wondering if I should say anything. But you’ll notice me. You said once, you’ll always notice me. I didn’t really know what you meant by it and never asked you to clarify. Some things are better left to wonder.

You’d come up to me asking if I thought socks were worth folding. We’d smile and it would take everything in me to not make a scene in front of the dryers. We would talk about the books we’ve read, the movies we saw. How we both wrote a handful of stories involving timing and chance to the point we didn’t believe it in anymore. Stories of strings with knots always getting caught on doorknobs. How we both have trouble completely forgetting. People lay idle in the dust of our minds, dormant in our toes until we come crashing into corners.

Or maybe, I’ll finally make it out to California. Land my dream job where I never have to put on pants. I’ll be working at a cute little café and you’ll walk in and get a tea. It could be a coffee I guess, time changes things, but I liked that you liked tea. We’d look up at each other and we would both just know. Know that things always work out the way they are supposed to. Because it has to. There is nothing else we could know, no other way it should be. There could be a multiverse, but we only know of the one we are in. Day dreams are great for inspiration, but it becomes hard to pay rent when you live in the clouds.

I don’t know if these chance meetings really exist. If your fingers are already tied to someone, somewhere, a joining imminent in the future. I’m not one for butterflies. A person I knew once said how terrifying they were. Their paths were so sporadic, completely unpredictable. A pretty poison when predators bit down. You’re butterfly lays sleepy somewhere. Resting for when it’s ready to be released. When faith in more, in trial and error, in guess and check works out to something beautiful. When our knots untie and the string to our hearts is merely inches apart.

Maybe, the last maybe, we weren’t meant for anything else. Someone else will replace my thoughts before I close my eyes. Your name will be only a smile, a happy “he did it” when I see it all over the place. A yellowed love letter stuck in a journal for my daughter to read one day. A letter of someone who reminds you to believe. To hope. To actively seek the life you want while the rest shifts into place.