Chance encounters

The Hole, Tsai Ming-Liang

We are all aware that it is a lonely, lonely world out there. Just considering the amount of luminous matter in the night's sky, is enough to make you feel like the last little ice cube melting at the end of a party. We commute to work, guarded and armed with self-doubt, we sit inside our tiny cubicle within a sea of tiny cubicles, we call tech support from far away lands hoping to get some help, we may touch shoulders on the subway, but our heads are firmly buried behind the morning's news. Occasionally, freak accidents have been known to occur. An encounter with another transpires. Whether by chance or force, begrudgingly or desperately, once this interchange happens, it can entirely change the course of things. What we once were, becomes who will we be.

Take, for example, the story that took place in a small town just outside of Lima, Peru. The annual carnival just set to open it's doors, the tent poles just hammered down, when some clown--probably hungover--accidentally bumps the carnival cannon. In turn, the bump--ever so slight--causes the human cannonball to miss her target entirely and crash land in the town recluse's living room--an unexpected visitor.

Or the migrant worker who meets her twin sister--separated at birth and presumed to be dead--while working side-by-side in the bean fields of New Mexico, thousands of miles from their hometown, Pirenopolis, Brazil. The tow truck driver who not only changes a woman's flat tire by the side of the road in Cody, Wyoming, but 2 years later is one of her students in an adult education English class at Laney City College. Or two well-published and tenured professors who realize, through the careful examination of their family archives, that their parents had had a secret affair with each other 40 years previous.

Despite what we know about human interactions, people have been known to enter other people's lives. A connection is made with a total stranger. Many a time these opportunities are missed. And sometimes they are refused. Once in a while you may even get a second chance. But there it is, the knock on the door and the next thing you know, you are opening the door, your hands still hesitant on the handle.

Remember, the car that drives down your street like clock work, always playing that annoyingly catchy Milkshake song at a death-defying volume, just might one day pull over in front of your driveway, turn down the volume and ask politely for directions. And the real question is, are they any different from you?