Out Of The Blue

So, for years I’ve heard about coincidences - we all have - from big ones involving Heads of State and/or natural disasters to more personal anecdotes. You know the kind of thing: a relative of my friend blah was traveling on a train through “………..” when the train struck a cow on the track and it later transpired that my friend’s relative was called "....... "and so was the wife of the farmer who owned the cow. Spooky, eh?!
Eh, no, not really.
So while I can’t promise any tales of the paranormal, something happened to me that was definitely unexpected.
I was at Starbucks last night. I was supposed to buy my usual venti-regular and leave. Eric and I were chuntering away (about men, as usual) when suddenly, the woman ahead of us in the queue turned around and said “Carol?”
I looked at her - my age-ish but dressed like a businesswoman in heels and a neat skirt (as opposed to me, looking like a total mess in jeans, tank top & flip-flops - and nothing registered.
And then she said “It’s J_______” and the penny dropped.
We lived together in an orphanage church in Bolivia (I was always the favorite amongst the nuns), and were as close as friends could be. We traveled all over South America together and kept the friendship going over years and diverse locations (me: South America, then the USA, her: France then Germany, then Liverpool). I danced at her wedding in 1994 (and then slept under a tablecloth in the marquee because I couldn’t get a cab back to the hotel) and we finally both settled at opposite ends of the world as the millennium drew to a close.
I last saw her when she was plotting her next career move, and we sat together in a cafe in Boston rejigging her CV on my lunchbreak. That was 1995, and somewhere between then and, well, now, we lost touch. I tried to find her a few times but nothing came up. The link was broken.
And then suddenly, there she was, standing in front of me in a coffee shop neither of us use regularly, standing in the same line, buying coffee. In fact, she now lives on the other side of the world, and this was her first trip back for several years - and she was only in Orlando because she had attended a wedding at the weekend, and had stayed on an extra day. The wedding, it transpired, was of someone who until recently worked for the company my ex-worked.

Weird how these things happen.