Things that happened/are happening

For over a year, you see her everywhere, the woman with the black Mercedes. You see her on Abbott Kinney, outside of LA Mill, at M Cafe. You see her at intersections and traffic lights. Once you saw her in the parking lot of the Arclight. For some reason, you are curious about her. Synchronicity is a mesmerizing bread crumb trail, but truthfully, you are curious about everyone. You snoop in on conversations people are having at restaurants and cafes. At the Silverlake Library, you pretend you are reading, but really you are watching the homeless man who is reading Ulysses and talking to the pug that he managed to sneak past the librarian in change. Because you have free time and an excess of imagination, you invent lives for strangers. The woman with the black Mercedes becomes a harbinger for good luck. If you see her, you know you will have a good day. She starts to appear in stories that you write. In writing, or in your imagined version of her, she is grim, and asks pointed questions. She always has a cigarette in hand. She laughs when you think of her as cynical. She points out that she is only part real, mostly, she is a figment of your imagination, as everyone is, to some extent.

Then one day, you are in a different city, far from home. Okay, you are in Denver. For a very particular reason. Strange thing happen to you in Denver. You are in a high-rise looking out over the city, waiting for the evening to begin, waiting for a client to show up, and when she does, you realize it is her, the woman in the black Mercedes. She tells you she is excited to meet you, she has already heard all about you. She gives you a hug, tells you she'd love to talk when you get back to LA. Then the woman in the black Mercedes (sans Mercedes on this day) tells you she is going back downstairs to smoke a cigarette. This event, occurring in a strange city, should surprise you, but it doesn't. The only thing that surprises you is how boisterous she is. And friendly.

It is like a moment from a dream, where the lines of reality are so blurred that your only option is to accept the absurdity of this moment. Should you tell her that all these months, you've been chronicling her imaginary life? That in your head, she is grim and calculated? No, this would deem you a crazy person or a stalker. Which you wholly admit you are, but still. You generally let this cat out of the bag later, after you've known someone a few months.

These things happen, are happening all the time. They will probably continue to happen. And you will unwrap them slowly, like small gifts left for you in different cities, on street corners and cafes, in intersections and parking lots. You will follow them wherever they wish to take you because this life is a long process of unwrapping things that come your way. It is best to take your time with these things, and see. For years you asked what these kinds of things meant. And then one day you realized: it is best to not ask exactly what they mean till you are ready, really ready for some kind of answer.