Coincidence?

Right now I am doing a repetitive, fairly mindless piece of proofreading. Since it is so mindless, I am listening to my iPod while I work. I’m listening to David Gray, and his music always reminds me of Nate.

About five years ago, Nate and I went to a David Gray concert with a mutual friend. We didn’t know each other very well and I think it was the first time we hung out socially. I thought he was funny. We stood and listened to David Gray at La Zona Rosa (I think that was the venue). At the time I had long hair, so I kept pulling it up and holding it away from my neck. He was standing behind me slightly and it felt like he was staring at me. I kept telling myself it was my imagination, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that he was staring.

Months later when we started dating, Nate told me that he was, in fact, staring at the back of my neck.

When we were picking songs for our wedding, David Gray seemed like the right choice. Our first dance was to “Sail Away.” I’m listening to that song now.

There were so many coincidences that brought about our relationship. Enough that I’ve started thinking there are no coincidences. Nate got hired to replace me at an old job, which is how we met. I moved away from Austin for the job and when I moved back I ended up moving into a house a block up the street from him. A few of our friends invited us to the same events and we gradually got to know each other. One Halloween night in particular (five years ago), I got into an argument with a friend, changed my plans at the last moment, and ended up spending that night on Nate’s lap because the place was packed and there were four of us and three chairs. We became friends after that night. Good friends. We hung out more often, talked on the phone and over IM. Then came the night when Nate asked for my advice. He’d been dating a girl who told him he went out too much with his friends and she couldn’t imagine the father of her children behaving this way. (For the record, they’d been dating a month and he was 26 years old at the time.) My advice: Dump her. Then things really got interesting …