People sometimes ask me this question at readings. What’s the strangest thing that’s ever happened to you, the kind of moment that makes you wonder if the universe is paying closer attention than we give it credit for? I used to give a polite, forgettable answer. Then I’d go home and think about the real one, the one I never tell anyone because it still unsettles me a little.
It happened during my banking years, long before I ever called myself a writer.
I was flying to Chicago for a closing. Nothing unusual about that. I did it a dozen times a year, the same gate, the same overpriced coffee, the same tired hum of fluorescent light over row after row of business travelers pretending to read. I sat down next to a woman I didn’t know. We exchanged the customary nothing, a nod, a comment about the delay. Then she pulled a paperback from her bag, and I noticed the title.
It was a novel I had read exactly once, years earlier, given to me by a professor who died not long after he gave it to me. I hadn’t seen another copy since. I hadn’t heard anyone mention it. It wasn’t the kind of book that showed up in airport shops or bestseller lists. And there it was, in the hands of a stranger, three thousand feet in the air.
I asked her about it, carefully, the way you do when you don’t want to seem strange yourself. She said her mother had given it to her. Her mother had passed away that spring. She was flying to Chicago to clean out her mother’s house, and she’d grabbed the book from the shelf almost without thinking, just to have something of hers along for the trip.
We sat in silence for a while after that. Two women, two dead teachers of literature by way of two dead people we’d loved, one paperback between us like a small bridge.
I didn’t believe in signs back then. I was still the version of myself who trusted spreadsheets more than mystery. But something in me went quiet and attentive in a way it hadn’t before, the way you go still when you sense you are standing somewhere holy without having meant to.
We talked for the rest of the flight. Not about the book, really. About grief, about the strange administrative work of loss, about the professor and the mother we had each just lost pieces of ourselves to. When we landed, we exchanged nothing, no numbers, no addresses. It didn’t feel like the kind of connection that needed continuing. It felt complete already, sealed shut like a letter that had reached the right person.
I think about her sometimes, that stranger with my dead professor’s book in her lap. I don’t know what to call what happened between us at thirty thousand feet. Coincidence is the word people reach for because it’s the only one that doesn’t ask anything of them. But I’ve come to believe some coincidences are just God being subtle. A small nudge to remind you that the threads of our lives are more tangled together than we know, that grief and love travel farther than we think, sometimes as far as a stranger’s carry-on bag.
I never saw her again. I never learned her name. But I kept writing after that flight, more than I ever had before. I’ve wondered since if that was the real coincidence. Not the book. The timing of it. Right when I needed proof that meaning still finds its way to us, even mid-air, even among strangers, even when we’ve stopped looking for it.
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