Fate

“Murder by Millions”

As I sit in the hallway waiting for something I don’t really want to wait for, I find myself wondering what the kid who just sat down across from me is listening to.  Does he listen to the same music I do?  Are we listening to the exact same band and perhaps even the same song?  Sure, it sounds far-fetched, but then what is the use of coincidence?

  Or perhaps it may be better termed fate.  Like, was I fated to get rejected from grad school, go back to school, become depressed and wind up in a no-brainer class because I need an easy class and it just happens to fit into a possible switch in majors.

Is it fate that this is the one day I choose to be bold and discover that we just happen to be listening to the same band and miraculously the same song.  Our conversation is only interrupted by the professor with her odd twang standing out among our own drab accents.  We continue right where we left off when class ends.

I never talk this much.

But it’s true love.

I dump my cat for a real person and the cat is only slightly miffed.

He proposes before we graduate and we’re wed a week after graduation with twins two years later and another kid on the way.  By all accounts it’s a happy marriage and family.

The kids are all honors students and attend Ivy League schools.  The youngest becomes the first female president and the twins earn a nobel prize for curing cancer.

We have a terrific home and plenty for a nice, early retirement.  We travel the world, seeing everything we ever dreamed of seeing.  We both die peacefully in our sleep a few weeks after our grandkids finish college. 

They never discover who went first, but they do discover something else.  Something that shattered everything; a body littered with scars and painfully deformed limbs.  No one can testify to the cause.  There’s speculation.

But only we know the truth.

As fate would have it, however, we weren’t listening to the same song, not even the same band.