Fate
by Philosopher

Each human life contains a handful of those strange, breathless moments, those sudden swoons when you feel as if the elevator has slipped its cable and you are plunging downward, or perhaps flying upward, with your stomach floating and your mind lurching dizzily with the question, "Can this really be happening?"

My own vertiginous descent began when I met a girl in a forest, at a mountaintop monastery east of San Diego. There were lights in the trees…

* * *

"I hate to pry," said a female voice behind me, "but may I ask why you're crawling through our campsite?"

I leapt to my feet, brushing twigs and leaves from my clothes, feeling my face grow hot.

She was small, blonde, cute, and squinting at me as if trying to determine whether I had overdosed on something.

"Well," I stammered, "I just wanted to take a picture of your lanterns." It sounded suspicious even to me. "But I had to lie down on the ground to get a good angle. See, the sunlight is perfect," I gestured toward the west, "and it's shining right through them."

She cocked her head and studied the Chinese paper lanterns that swung from the trees around her camp, glowing with the light of the setting sun. My friends and I were roughing it for a weekend, along with 600 other free spirits, at a three-day Burning Man regional event called Xara Dulzura.

"Would you mind if I…?" I gestured from the lanterns to the ground to my camera.

She smiled warmly, having apparently concluded that I was not a maniac.

"Sure, come on in. I'm Rachel." She shook my hand. "And this," she pointed to a tall, pretty redhead emerging from a tent, "is my friend Daryl."

"Hi," Daryl said, walking over a bit unsteadily to shake my hand. "I'm seeing trails. I apologize if I seem weird, or if I'm standing on your foot or anything."

"Actually you seem perfectly normal," I said.

"Wow. Are you sure it's not just you?"

"Well, uh…" I was contemplating this mental pretzel when—

"Would you like a cocktail?" shouted Rachel, rummaging around on a big folding table which was entirely covered with half-empty liquor bottles, used cups, and crumpled Doritos bags containing only crumbs and a few nacho-flavored bugs.

“Sure!” said Daryl.

“Sure!” said I.

While she mixed up a few strong screwdrivers, I took some photos of the lanterns.

“Cheers,” said Rachel, and we toasted the setting sun. It was a fitting end to one of those perfect days that crystallize only in the mountains— sunny, clear, and cool, with that slightly-too-clean taste to the air that comes from unusual altitude.

“So what are you doing tonight?” asked Rachel.

* * *

I’m not quite sure when the blue wig came out, or how it ended up on my head, or whether the lipstick came from a tube or someone’s lips, but I soon found myself decked out like a skid-row drag queen, reeling around with a big, sticky drink in one hand and a blonde girl in the other.

We had coalesced into a group of six, consisting of Rachel’s camp-mates Daryl and Donna, their two boyfriends, and me and Rachel, now pressed by the laws of group symmetry into a de facto unit.

The techno throb of the dance-clubs felt overwhelming, so we gravitated to a chill-out lounge, where blacklight glowed softly on Persian rugs, and mellow trip-hop pulsed like a breathy moan from the speakers.

Occasionally one or two of us would make a run for more drinks. It was on one of those runs that I yielded to an impulse and pulled Rachel into a grove of oaks and kissed her. The warmth of mutual passion flowed, and the kissing stretched on for a long time.

“I’ve been wanting to do that since I saw you,” I said. Thankfully I had forgotten that I looked like a cheap tranny hooker, or I would have felt ridiculous playing the suave leading man.

The rest of that night Rachel and I drifted in and out of these secret trysts, disappearing for a while then re-emerging to join the roaming gang at one theme-camp or another. We discovered that we lived in the same city, so we resolved to get together back in the real world. The next day, we exchanged e-mail addresses, parted with a kiss, and went our separate ways down the mountain and back home.

* * *

Back to work, back to life, back to obligations. We exchanged the obligatory “it was great” e-mails and promised to see each other soon.

Weeks went by. “Some time this week,” we said, but life always intervened.

And of course there was my backlog of Internet dating e-mails, robbing me of motivation. For about two years I had been dabbling in the e-dating scene, using several of the most popular sites: Match.com, Yahoo Personals, e-Harmony, and so on. After a weekend away, I had a promising stack of replies in my mailbox. I dutifully followed each of them up, and then I fell back into the groove of work, telling myself I’d make a date with Rachel any day now. And the days drifted by.

A few weeks later, I checked my Yahoo Personals account and was surprised to find a new message waiting for me. This in itself is rare. In my experience, it is the men who usually initiate contact, while the women sit back and sift their suitors with the Delete key. Alas, just like the real world.

It dawned on me that I had been neglecting my Yahoo account, and I worried that this new message may have been waiting for several days, and that the sender had probably written me off as uninterested.

But when I opened it, I felt a strange tingling. The photo looked familiar, but only in that vague way that someone on the street looks like a movie star you can’t quite call to mind. And then I noticed the name: Rachel. I looked at the photo again. Could it be her? Could this beautiful woman be the same girl who had tramped around the dusty woods with me in a hooded sweatshirt and no makeup? It seemed unlikely, but we all look a bit rumpled after a few days in the woods…

I eagerly scanned her profile, finding correlation after correlation. It was her!

I laughed. I could imagine her sitting in the blue glow of her computer screen, late at night, stumbling across my profile and thinking, “Could that be the guy from Dulzura? Yes! I’ll send him a generic ‘Hello, I liked your profile’ message, as if we’d never met.” And now she was probably wondering why I hadn’t replied. How long had this letter been waiting?

And that’s when the elevator started falling. The date on the message was a week before the Dulzura event.

* * *

“I am completely freaking out,” I wrote to her. “Did you know about this? Am I losing my mind? Did you know, when we met in the mountains, that you had already tried to contact me through Yahoo?”

“No! I didn’t recognize you out there. And here’s what’s even weirder: I had just decided to try Internet dating for the first time, and you were the very first person I contacted! I only figured all this out a few days ago, and believe me, I flipped out also! But I didn’t tell you, because I wanted you to get the full experience of freaking out on your own.”

“Well, uh, thanks. It worked.”

My mind would not stop reeling. What were the odds that—between the time she sent that Personals message and the time I checked my e-mail—we would meet independently at an obscure mountain monastery; that we would somehow zero in on each other, out of 600 people; and that we would unknowingly strike up a romance? It was too weird for belief.

She wrote: “ So, I guess we had our first date without even knowing it.”

* * *

My mystically-minded friends called it Fate, or Karma, or Cosmic Forces, but my Spock-like reason rejected that. On the other hand, the little bean-counter inside my head kept shouting, “But what are the odds!”

The fact was not lost on me that it was a monastery—a place of reputed mystical power—that had brought us together. I even wrote to one friend, “If an atheist like me could ever be converted, it would take something like this.”

Naturally, after our astonishing discovery, Rachel and I moved quickly to meet again. We went out a few times, looking closely for the marks of fate on each other. We communed in all the passionate ways that a man and woman can, seeking to fire the spark that we knew must somehow exist between us.

Then one day I wrote to her: “You know, this has been absolutely delightful, but I have the feeling we may be trying to force it because of the astonishing way we met.”

She replied, “Somehow we are always on the same plane in this cosmic universe. I was having the same thoughts and I want to thank you for being the bigger person and saying it first.”

So, still marveling at our curious adventure, we parted with kindness and a vow of friendship, and we promised to stay in touch. And we have.

She called me two weeks ago to say she had met the love of her life, and that she was moving to Texas to live with him. I offered my sincere congratulations, feeling thrilled for her, almost as if my long-lost twin had suddenly found true love.

I hope they’ll invite me to the wedding, so I can write something cryptic in the guest book that only the two of us will ever understand.