or does it mean anything when things line up

This is not the letter I thought I’d be writing this week. In my typical fashion, I started approximately one trillion different letters about various subjects, a lot of them unnecessarily lengthy, me trying to cover too serious a subject, in full, at too early a date—this is a pattern, for me, in writing and in communication.

Patterns, what the human brain looks for. Coincidence, something the human mind creates, or searches for, or ignores the rest to find. I’m not a big believer in the “everything is meant to be” mentality, I don’t subscribe to the idea of some carefully chosen design laid out for me by some all-knowing presence. I have, recently, started to talk to the Universe, the closest I can get to a thing bigger than myself that I can take comfort in, and I have started to try to see things as opportunities presented by the Universe. Is it coincidence that the Universe offers up X when X has been on my mind? Maybe. But I’m the one living this life, so if I can get something from it, I should probably try.

All that being said, the last week was a bizarre confluence of coincidences that I find I must tell you about, whether I want to or not. It has been on my mind, and that was the whole point of gentle animal.

the mouth of the river

Did you know the word confluence also means the junction of two rivers, usually of approximately equal width? I did not, until I googled it just now. I am usually aware that when I see A Lot of Coincidences, they stem from the same source that is obviously impacting what my brain is looking for.

The source for this week’s letter is the sprawling fantasy novel Little, Big by John Crowley. I read this from 1/9-1/17 for a virtual book club. A NPR review of the book described it as “the only example of contemporary magical realism” that someone knew of. I think that’s a good way to basically explain it: published in 1981, it is a world that looks like our America, that also has a faerie world at its heart.

I have complicated feelings about it—which I’m happy to share with any of you who are interested in it—but I won’t go into those here. Suffice it to say, magic, inexplicable things, confluences were on my brain because of this book.

the last junction, which happened first

Due to its fantastical nature, it will probably not surprise you, then, that the first realm to be most directly impacted by this novel was my dreams.

I have not historically been A Dreamer, but I have found recently, deep in the throes of covid isolation, that this is changing. I have dreamed every single night for the past 2-3 weeks—of large gatherings of people, primarily—and though I can’t remember all of the dreams, I always remember that I have dreamed.

On the night of January 10th, I had a dream which I won’t detail all of, just the ending.

This dream had already turned magical realism on its own, but at the end of it, I was in the small but airy dining room of a kind of European flat that was not mine. M was with me. On one of the shelves behind him, suddenly I noticed the helmet of an old suit of armor that I had not seen before. The visor raised on its own, and inside there was a man’s face. This face began to speak to M, though I could hear it: “Something happened yesterday, something small, and you thought you were going to be fine, but you haven’t been feeling well since then.” As it spoke, particles of golden light floated out of the helmet’s opening and encircled M, turning his face from neutral to panicked to pained. He clutched his sternum. I was in front of him then, rubbing my hands across his chest, trying to sooth him with variations on you’ll be fine. It didn’t work; the pain intensified; my calming you’ll be fine changed to a panicked no, please, no. He collapsed against me, I caught him in my arms, and Dream Me let out a horrible, guttural scream, which startled Real Me awake in the middle of the night.

[This is not rare for me: having never been afraid of my own death, I am now constantly terrified by the prospect of M’s. This is not news to him: we’ve talked about it, and I’m working on making friends with death in a variety of ways. A topic for another time.]

This was not yet a coincidence, at the time, just a bad dream. It would become a coincidence.

the second junction

On January 15th, I was outside in our backyard, walking around while Nugget, our dog (whose real name is Bear but who is more often referred to by his nickname), smelled around. I have walked the circle of our backyard many times: we have a small, kidney-shaped pool at the center, cement circling it, rock areas around that with succulents planted in them. I have stared at the ground often as we figure out what to do back there.

But on this day, something caught my eye in the rocks that I have scanned over many times before: a pop of color, a bright green that stood out. I bent down and picked it up: a small, ceramic leaf, buried in the rocks, traces of adhesive on the back as though it had once been attached to something. Strange, I thought.

Then my eyes saw another pop of color, yellow this time—another leaf, I picked it up—and then another, green again, another leaf, and another, and another. Finally, all the color seemed gone, and I had 7 leaves in my hand.

Reader, I want you to know that I am sitting outside writing this on January 21st, and as I got to the section about finding the leaves in the rocks, I glanced over at that area in pursuit of the memory, and my eyes alighted immediately on yet another pop of color, and I found an eighth leaf, a fourth and final green one.

This certainly seemed, seems, like fairy magic—how had I never noticed these before, and have only just noticed them while reading about creatures who leave gifts for humans? And yet my rational brain says: this is coincidence, your brain looking for gifts, nothing more. Maybe your neighbors threw some shit over the fence. Maybe you never looked as hard at this area as you thought you had. Who knows. Many coincidences; no coincidences.

the third junction

On the morning of January 17th, I woke up in A Mood. M and I had had a minor miscommunication going to bed the night before, and because we were going to bed, we had not resolved it, and because we had not resolved it, I woke up in A Mood. It wasn’t a big miscommunication, unimportant really, and we resolved it later, but I found myself privately trying to articulate how I felt, what that Mood was.

Tenderhooks, I thought. Wait, no, tenterhooks, right? Tenderhooks is the colloquial mishearing of it. Right? Well, whatever, on ten(t/d)erhooks, that’s how I feel.

I thought this over my morning tea, about half an hour before I picked up Little, Big to read the last 100 pages. I had stopped on page 429 the day before, at the break before the sixth and final book.

There, on page 435, only seven pages in, the word appeared, and the correct spelling, it confirmed for me, was tenterhooks.

Now, tenterhooks is not a word I see thrown around often, hence my momentary confusion about how to spell it. It had not appeared previously in Little, Big. And yes, of course, for a book that spans 538 pages, many words are bound to be used. I am still not sure how I thought of the word tenterhooks moments before reading it; I felt as though I’d conjured it into existence on the page.

Reader, I must also tell you, I saw tenterhooks YET AGAIN in a video game—or an “interactive visual novel”—I played in a couple hours on Tuesday, 1/19: If Found, Please Return by Irish game studio—wait for it—dreamfeel. Many coincidences; no coincidences.

the fourth, and final, and also first, junction

Like the third conjunction, he last coincidence—and the first junction, in retrospect—also occurred on January 17th, in the final 100 pages of Little, Big.

I will write this section trying not to spoil the book. Forgive the vague pronouns and lack of context.

But, you remember my dream, the first junction which was not a junction yet. Well, eight pages away from the end of the book, a main character begins to feel a tingle in their left arm and hand, a “warning bell” that they do not heed but that we know they should, and then their heart begins to open up, a “premonition, or in the intimation of a revelation,” and the opening widens and the pain rushes in along with nature and their family. Another character passes them in this moment, the moment of their death. “Face to face,” she mutters. Face to face. This character takes no further steps, has no further lines; they appear, after this point, only in reference to their burial, performed alone by their spouse.

I know heart attacks are commonly used in stories to denote sudden, “unexpected” deaths. I know there is really nothing unique in worrying that your beloved spouse will die, suddenly, “unexpectedly” from a heart attack. I know there is then nothing unique in an author using a heart attack to suddenly, “unexpectedly” wipe a character from her pages.

Time and distance can, of course, turn nearly everything into coincidence. I try to remember if there was any hint before page 530 of this extremely long book that this character would die this way—something, anything to explain exactly how my brain turned a passing clue into a nighttime terror many days before that information would culminate in an eerily similar death scene for a character in a book. I don’t remember; there might have been. Does it, ultimately, matter?

Life is many coincidences; life is no coincidences; life is all coincidences. The scope of my knowledge is not wide enough to encompass the answer to this question, nor will it ever be, and so, ultimately, it doesn’t matter. I think I used to either write them off completely or coincidences used to freak me out; now they mostly make me laugh—a cosmic laugh, a kind of fantastical chuckle, more sure of the knowledge that things either are or aren’t, that they can mean something or they don’t, that people are here or they’re not. It’s ultimately up to us how we understand these things.

I am working on my relationship to death, and in a documentary about a handful of people who are living out their last days knowing they will die, a woman tells a story about a thin silver thread that danced in her window the day her lover, a man who lived for dancing, died. “I wanted someone else there to confirm what I was seeing,” she says, frustrated in a way that communicates there was no on there to confirm. “But I thank Clair for that, for that sign from him.”

holding hands at our wedding celebration, captured by Bri McDaniel

Many coincidences; no coincidences.

Thanks for reading. As always, yours, ready to receive.