The day that I met Dan, I had a feeling…before I saw his face walking towards me at the gates of Columbia- I looked up at the sky and asked God in a very dramatic fashion that whatever was going to come of this relationship, it would bring him honor.  The afternoon was pleasant- nothing miraculous.  You bought my sandwich at Hamilton’s and a bottle of grapefruit juice of which I only finished half.  So when I got home with that bottle- I decided to wash it and keep it and tell our child(ren) it was the first thing their father ever bought me.  This was the first day I met you.

The bus that drops off commuters in front of our building comes every five minutes during rush hour, but I would only get up once, go to the window and pull back the curtain when I heard the brakes of the bus screech it to a halt.  That was the time when, sure enough, you were coming off the bus and and I could recognize your silhouette and your manner of walking from the window.

Many times, I’d pick up the phone to call you and at that exact moment, I’d see an incoming call from you.

Despite how different we were as people, there was a synchronicity- a knowing.

The writer of the book I’m currently quite enchanted with, Catherine Marshall, writes about this synchronicity in the book about her own young widowhood in the early 1950’s:

“And then I thought of an incident that had taken place seven days prior to Peter’s death.  He and I had been visiting friends in a nearby city.  Their guest room had twin beds.  Some-time after the lights had been turned out and we had gone to bed, long after the house was quiet, suddenly I had put out one hand toward the other bed, and had found Peter’s hand stretched out in the darkness waiting for mine.


He had whispered, ‘How did you know that my hand was there?’
And I had answered, ‘I don’t know.  I just knew.’


So now the space between us was wider, much wider- greater than the distance between any twin beds.  It stretched all the way across the eternities that divide the world of the seen from the world of the unseen.  Somewhere out in that emptiness an outstretched hand was waiting for me.”  


I desperately want to believe that I could have this kind of cosmic intuition, but much like Catherine says as she continues on in the chapter- I only feel emptiness now.