A bright spring morning after days of clouds and rain. A good night’s sleep. So why did I wake with a sense of impending doom? There are no foreboding events on the horizon. I haven’t violated any obvious rules of mental hygiene, i.e., I don’t stay up late watching slasher movies. A few times in the past, such uneasiness has preceded nasty events, but not very often.
I did some yoga and meditation, which helped but didn’t dispel the mood. What I really wanted to do was get outdoors, so I took a walk at a local park. Afterwards, I felt like a cup of coffee and went to Starbucks.
As I sat down, a man who looked vaguely familiar said, “Morgan?”
I couldn’t quite place him and had to ask his name. Turns out he and I were friends almost 25 years ago. He went to work for the state, and I started taking night classes after work, and we lost touch. I thought he had moved away, but he still lives where he did back then, little over a mile away as the crow flies.
We talked for a while and traded phone numbers. He said he built a boat and mentioned fishing. I thought of baseball once the season starts. The sense of impending doom was gone. And yet, if it hadn’t been there when I got up…
I wouldn’t have gone to the park…
and would have made coffee at home…
so I wouldn’t have been at Starbucks to cross paths with an old friend.
When I really pay attention, I find I do not understand how anything works.
The First Gates 
What a nice ending, and such a surprise. I think I smell some flash fiction in the air!
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Not immediately. Without a bit of finessing, such events would be too implausible for fiction!
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“too implausible for fiction…” LOL. It reminds me of something you said in critique one day about a section in my YA book — “This might happen in real life, but no way it could happen in fiction.”
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I forget who it was – some well known, contemporary author, who was asked about the difference between life and fiction.
He said, “Fiction has to make sense.”
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I love this post – my father, who went to high school in a little place called Marshalltown, Iowa, had a football coach that he came to know quite well.
Some twenty-five years later, at a Starbucks in Texas, he bumped into that same football coach while he stood in line!
Incredible how life works sometimes 🙂
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Thanks for the very neat story. I’ve rediscovered old connections on Facebook, but nothing is quite so dramatic as in-person reunions.
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Maybe the impending doom was waiting at your house while you went out into the world, got tired of hanging around, and left before you got back home. Maybe.
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As good an explanation as any…
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Trust the force Luke, I mean Morgan….
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