I attended a lecture at a well-known university last night. The lecture was from one of my favorite authors, a woman with an impish grin and a gnarled wooden cane. I had been planning to go for months and had marked the event on my calendar with several exclamation points. A friend was coming along, and we set a place and time to meet up before the lecture. As fate would have it, I was kept late at work. This never happens. When I arrived at the top of the station stairs to catch my connecting train, I had a text message from said friend: “Late as usual, still waiting at X station.” I gasped to myself, seeing her familiar brown hair, just down the platform. It must be a sign.

The city’s proclivity for a haphazard encounter is so rare that one is tempted to draw great meaning from it. A friend of mine once ran into a boy upwards of five times in a two month period.  They had been friends during college. She saw him all over the city, from Bed-Stuy to Lincoln Center. Lest you cry “stalk” I assure you this was not the case. Both parties were equally jarred by the sight of the other, time after time. I concluded, reasonably, that they should get married. What else could it mean? By the fifth or sixth time it happened, my friend yawned as she told me, explaining that she had held her book up over her face until he exited the train. I was astounded at her lack of wonder, and began to question my own magical thinking.

I attached great meaning to every minute vibration surrounding the author’s lecture. Perhaps I would attend this university, looking back later at this particular evening as a turning point in my life. Did I fit into this community? My god, they are serving us stuffed grape leaves!  What would it be like, to study in these hallowed halls, my feet treading the oriental carpets of wisdom? What does it mean that she, this respected author, chose to mention the very book I am reading? Am I ordained with some noble task? Imbued now, with heroic purpose? And so on, and so forth. Even that morning, as I opened the doors to my office building, a man walked past me, catching my eye with his peculiar, stiff gait. He wore white sneakers with a black suit, and a pin on his lapel which read: I [HEART] CHESS. I thought to myself: “Today will be a good day”.  I was right.

Conversely, we have all experienced illogical regret over baseless decisions regarding the subway. You wait for the express train, believing it to be the quicker option. You curse yourself as the announcement comes on: all B trains are stalled at Atlantic-Pacific Street, why oh why did you not think to hop on the local train when it arrived? You will be late to the job interview, you will miss the doctor’s appointment, forever altering the course of your life with one breath of false intuition.

A story goes that my family member had not heard from his elderly father at the prescribed time and grew worried that something might have happened to him. Jumping in the car, my uncle began the drive out of the city and into the small town in which his father lived. Slowing to stop at a red light, a shadow came swooping over his windshield. In the afternoon sunlight, a great gray owl flapped past the car, stopped for the briefest of moments, and looked directly into the driver’s seat. It was suddenly clear to my uncle that his father had passed away, though he wouldn’t know it for sure until he arrived at the house. A nocturnal bird in the afternoon, a pair of perfectly round eyes gaze intently through a pane of glass.  This goes against the natural order of things.  This is a sign to be interpreted.  In a city, there is no natural order of things. The baseline is chaos.

I don’t know which is better, to draw meaning from everything or to draw meaning from nothing. One option borders on insanity and the other borders on boredom. Walking home from the lecture with great thoughts swimming in my head, words, forms, meanings, expansions, innovations, a man yelled at me on the sidewalk. “Damn girl, you got some big legs.” From this I can only conclude: my legs are not small. It simply cannot be a coincidence, as I have heard this same remark on several occasions.  Or maybe this IS the natural order of things: a recurring factual statement on my limbs.  Maybe I am just not yet spiritually ready to receive the true message, which is either to take a limb-slimming pilates class, or, kick someone in the groin, swiftly, with my great strength.