Jade and Alexander

It's 4:31AM. The birds will be up soon. I've noticed that the later I stay up, the deeper I think about certain things. The topic of thought on tonight's menu is chance encounters.

What I find interesting is the events that lead up to these chance encounters. Every decision, every action brings us to where we are in the present. I feel if one event from a person's life was missing, they wouldn't be who they are today and thus would not have met and befriended certain people. For example, I would not have the friends I do now and would not be with the man I'm with now if one thing had been different. If my parents had never divorced for instance, I would be a whole other person. My life would have gone in another direction and would be nothing like the life I have now. Perhaps I would have stuck to my dream of becoming a vet. Perhaps I would have followed in my sister Lauren's footsteps to become a star runner. Who knows?
This topic of thought, this sudden obsession with the magic behind chance encounters began because at 2AM (or maybe it was 1AM. I have no idea. My sense of time is so warped at the moment), I came across a quote by Chuck Klosterman that reads as follows:
"We all have the potential to fall in love a thousand times in our lifetime. It's easy. The first girl I ever loved was someone I knew in sixth grade. Her name was Missy; we talked about horses. The last girl I love will be someone I haven't even met yet, probably. They all count. But there are certain people you love who do something else; they define how you classify what love is supposed to feel like. These are the most important people in your life, and you'll meet maybe four or five of these people over the span of 80 years. But there's still one more tier to all of this; there is always one person you love who becomes that definition. It usually happens retrospectively, but it always happens eventually. This is the person who unknowingly sets the template for what you will always love about other people, even if some of those lovable qualities are self-destructive and unreasonable. You will remember conversations with this person that never actually happened. You will recall sexual trysts with this person that never technically occurred. This is because the individual who embodies your personal definition of love does not really exist. The person is real, and the feelings are real-- but you create the context. And context is everything. The person who defines your understanding of love is not inherently different than anyone else, and they're often just the person you happen to meet the first time you really, really want to love someone. But that person still wins. They win, and you lose. Because for the rest of your life, they will control how you feel about everyone else."

As a result of reading this, I began to think about how my current relationship came about. My boyfriend (his name is Mike) had transferred in second semester of this year. I was a freshman who should have been a sophomore. The only reason this wasn't so was because I took a gap-year which was spent proving to my parents I could handle a $45,000 education by going to a significantly cheaper institution. Anyway, back to the story. One snowy night in February when I wasn't so sober, my friend Ryan, an exuberant-all-American-metal head, introduced me to Mike. We shared a fondness for That Handsome Devil and "party hats". Now we're together. Our meeting does not truly adhere to the definition of a 'chance encounter' (we would have met eventually. He and I knew and were friends with the same people). It's because he chose Goucher out of all the colleges in Maryland to be closer to someone he loved. It's because I had chosen to take a gap-year instead of entering college the same year as all of my high school friends (well, in a sense I did. However, because most of my credits taken at Bergen Community College did not transfer over, it's sort of like the whole experience never happened at all). So in a way it was a chance encounter. At least, I think it was. Then, probably because of the late hour and the fact I was suffering from hunger pains and partial exhaustion, I began to think more deeply about chance encounters themselves and what makes them so fascinating to me. Now here I am. It's 5:27AM. I'm still suffering from hunger pains. I'm still partially exhausted. Yet I'm happy. I'm happy because there is French vanilla chai upstairs, "Home" by Edward Sharpe & The Magnetic Zeros is playing, and I'm in love.

Bliss. True Bliss.