Intersections

published as lost & found column#19 on May 14, 2005

 

Whenever I fall into conversation with married couples who come from different provinces, or different islands, I always ask for the story of how they met. It fascinates me how, for example, a girl from Bukidnon would end up with a guy from Coron in northern Palawan. Or how a woman from Bohol ever got together with her husband from Ilocos.

 

Usually it’s work, or school, or a conference or vacation that brings would-be lovers together. Sometimes it’s common acquaintances—a classmate’s sister’s ex-boyfriend’s roommate’s best friend—the six degrees of separation at work. Through the internet, it’s even easier to discover who knows who, through Friendster, or my personal favorite Multiply, and a host of other networking sites.

 

Some people hook up closer to home. A psychologist calls it the architecture of relationships—the people closest to our hearts are usually the people who move in the same buildings we enter and exit every day. Like apartments, grocery stores, churches, a favorite bar.

 

Romantics would call it plain, old fate. Or serendipity--a single glance at the right time, at the right place, that gives us an awesome glimpse of beauty in a person we otherwise would ignore. Or finding a long-lost friend in a crowd while you’re both on vacation in downtown Timbuktu. Or sitting in a plane next to someone who turns out to be your new neighbor.

 

Intersections aren’t just places where people from all over tend to converge; airports and universities, of course, are natural hubs for convergence. Crucial moments, that second look, and chronically transient people who bring all the towns they’ve ever lived or worked in with them wherever they go, are also intersections. Also words, names dropped in casual conversation about persons or places that have passed through our lives.

 

Sometimes intersections are the questions that first must be asked: where do you come from? how did you get here? what do you do? whom do you love? Then parallel lives so similar, they never met, suddenly intersect and are never the same again. These times we say we have met our soulmate, the mirror images in our lives too many to ignore.

 

I believe all intersections are inevitable, no such thing as a chance meeting, or an accidental glance. There is a purpose for our paths crossing with certain people, a good reason they sometimes cross again and again, though it seems only to open old wounds, or sometimes never again, though we feel in that intersection we might have found bliss.

 

Some intersections we wish had never happened, and wonder why they had to happen. There are questions, I have learned, that will have to remain unanswered.

 

I only have faith that each intersection is a gift, a chance for two people to give something of themselves to each other, even for awhile. An intersection may last a lifetime, a year, or perhaps just an hour. But each one leaves us changed, no matter how slight—the person’s voice, the vague memory of how light touches his eyes, finding its way into our soul, making it just a little bigger than it was before.