They say that if you stay in one place long enough, you’ll meet everyone you know. Today’s been a very good example of that for me.
Today, I was at a hotel in Quezon City, supervising a shoot for a voter education video my office is producing and, it seemed like we’d been there forever. I got up to stretch my legs, turned and saw this tall, stylish lady, wandering around like she was lost. And she was a friend.
She saw me and we had a lively exchange of “what are you doing here?” as we Filipinos are wont to do whenever we run into people we know. I showed her the way out and went back to the shoot. Coincidences happen.
Later in the day, after the photoshoot ended, I sent my crew down to the restaurant. Because we couldn’t all fit into the elevators, I stayed behind and waited for the elevator car to come back for me. When it did, I punched “G” and slipped into some end-of-the-day woolgathering. The doors slid open and I sort of drifted out absentmindedly. It was a few moments before I realized I was in the wrong place and beat a hasty retreat. Fortunately, the other elevator – there were two – opened up on the floor I was on, on its way down to the ground floor.
As I got out of the ground floor, I heard the elevator I was on originally – the other one, remember – ding open at roughly the same time. I stepped out of the car I was in and caught a fleeting glance of the foreign national just about to get into the other elevator.
I didn’t see her face, but there was something oddly familiar about the totality of her that I almost involuntarily said her name out loud. At the sound I made, she turned around and it WAS her! I hadn’t seen her in years, hadn’t spoken to her all that time, and had no idea she was going to be in town, and yet, there she was, right at the same moment that I was there as well.
It was a good kind of eerie, and it had me all giddy for about an hour and a half. I was having a very late lunch – some would say a ridiculously early dinner – with my crew when I looked up and across the crowded restaurant, popped up another face I knew. Yet one more person I hadn’t seen in years, and who just happened to be where I was at that particular instant.
Neat, right? Three random intersections, occurring at this very exact point in my life?