This weekend I went to a birthday party to commemorate a near-death and met a stranger who was a dear friend.

How could that happen?

Well, it didn’t start there, but a couple of years ago friends bullied me into using a dating site where I spotted the profile of a local biker who struck me as being so ‘into himself’ I couldn’t help sending him a message (‘nice pipes’) and forgetting him.

Perhaps it was karmic, then, that I got stood up a while later, swore to take the next offer I got, and went online to discover the biker trying to ‘chat’ with me. Trying… getting frustrated… and asking me out for drinks instead. And… dammit!… I had to go!

I almost forgot him again when I got to the pub he’d picked and spotted a seriously sexy guy at the bar. ‘Could that be my date?’ I hesitated. ‘He is now!’ I thought, and stepped up before I could back down. Luckily, he was the one… it went well… and he asked me out again.

Of course, one of the first things my new beau did was ask about my experience with motorcycles, which I confessed was ‘little’, ‘long ago’, and had caused me such grief that I’d tried to foget them. In fact, all I cared to recall was riding with a high school friend named ‘Chrissy’ I could never forget. When he herd that, though, he simply mentioned having a friend named Christine who rode, offered to introduce us, and (forgetting that ‘grief’ bit) took me for a ride.

Then, he spent the next year or so causing me so much trouble that when we did run into Christine here and there I barely bothered to notice her and chalked any similarities up to ‘coincidence’ or ‘wishful thinking’. Last summer, though, when I herd Christine’d had an accident and wasn’t likely to make it, I couldn’t help wondering if I could be missing out on some ‘last chance’. So, I asked about visiting her in hospital but when he said ‘forget it’ I felt foolish and did.

A couple of weeks ago, though, we ran into a mutual friend who told us Christine was throwing a belated birthday party on the anniversary of her accident and we were invited. Worried I wouldn’t belong, I almost skipped it, but when I learned it’d be held three houses from mine, I stopped by to be polite.

‘I still say I know you from someplace,’ Christine said when we got a moment together, and while I couldn’t recall having herd that, I took the oportunity to settle my own doubts by asking if she’d ever been to the nowhere northern where Chrissy and I met.

She had. Even then, though, I couldn’t be sure because it’d been so long that I’d forgotten ‘features’ and simply recalled our friendship. So, I asked if she’d gone to this high school… dated that chick… or worked at this joint…(?) and when she said she had, I was gob-smacked. ‘Chrissy?!’

‘Small world!’ she laughed, and we chatted a bit before cutting things short in defference to other guests. Unfortunately, when I tried to give her my number before leaving, she laughed because we could see my house from hers, and assured me we’d get together again. But, that’s yet to happen.

Mean time, I can’t help recalling what Chrissy said about there having to be a reason our paths had crossed again when I whiped out my cell and told her I wasn’t losing track of her again.

Could it be that ‘fate’ exists and we’ve reconnected for some specific but, as yet, unknow reason…? Could it be ‘karma’ bringing us together because of some other-life connection or a lesson one or both needs to learn? Or could coincidence, chance, or luck be behind it?

I don’t know. But, I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t dying to find out!