unlikely

We used to believe, the two of us, in that perfect star-crossed connection, some unlikely story bringing us together with our respective loves--it didn't have to be a big thing, of course, but something cute you could tell your friends. We took the same bus every Thursday and then we saw each other at a bar on the completely other end of town and we hit it off. We ran into each other at a concert and there was a spark there, but she disappeared while I was at the coat check, but then I saw the same band at the same venue five years later and there she was, smiling. And so on. The little things that tell the world: this was fate.

And I know a part of both of us still wants that world to exist, of course, but just as obviously the world can't work like that. It's too dark out there for whimsy, even if the nights are perfect at this time of year, when the heat of the summer starts to fade and those first chills of autumn creep in and the stars are so bright and clear.

We both had a few relationships like that in our time, where everything seemed so unlikely and perfect right up until everyone involved realized that coincidence is a flimsy foundation on which to build anything, even if at the time it feels so important.

Maybe it is important. Maybe it's us who have gotten too grim for this world, too serious, too afraid to leap into the unknown based on nothing but that overwhelming feeling that this is too unlikely to ignore. I've been wrong before.

What I know is this: we've spent the evening wistfully lamenting our naivety over some cheap beer left over from someone else's party. How foolish we were back then, and how fortunate to be so foolish. If only we could go back to do it all over again, would we? And if we did, would we make different choices, or relive them all over again? If we were fools then, were we still fools now?

When we were younger it would have been wine or coffee or something we thought was romantic or at least poetic, and we would have thought there were answers to these questions. Of this much, at least, I am certain: the world will never provide answers.

As we stood on the porch, we brushed against each other several times, each one of us daring the other to make a move after so many years of searching for magic elsewhere--but perhaps there's still some of that youthful idealism left in us. We're not nearly unlikely enough.