Women I knew I’d meet before I met them
| Coincidence level: 10/10 Category: Is it destiny? |
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This is a story of three women I knew I was going to meet before I even met them. One I met in Lisbon, and two in Barcelona shortly thereafter.
A bonus – they were all linked to each other in strange ways. They were all strangers to each other.
I’ll start in chronological order (by date).
ISABELLA
About two weeks into living in Lisbon, I already knew I was only going to stay the month and then move to Barcelona. I was meant to stay in Lisbon all summer, but I knew in my bones, as much as I loved Portugual, that Lisbon wasn’t going to be the city for me.
I had a friend visiting from New York that weekend, and we went out for dinner at a Fado venue, where a lovely woman from Jersey belted out some soulful Fado tunes. At least we surmised that the guitarist was Portuguese. We unwittingly drank port that was 60 euro per glass. By then, we were pretty drunk. We bar hopped around Bairro Alto—not knowing the names of bars or what we were in for, but going from place to place. At one bar foreigners bought us drinks. At another bar a guy I’d met in Lagos recognized me from a year ago and was still mad at me for having made out with his girlfriend (in front of him, with his permission). I hadn’t remembered him. We finally ended up at a hole in the wall—I didn’t know the name of the bar.
“Hey,” my friend said to me, “that girl keeps looking at you.”
I looked over and there was a girl with bleached blond hair. The rest of the night was hazy, but I remembered speaking with her, and nothing else.
Two weeks later, I was with a friend I’d met in Porto by the name of David, and we stumbled back to that bar in Bairro Alto—completely by accident. I wasn’t even meant to go out that night (David had wanted to), much less to that bar. Hadn’t sought it out, didn’t know the name of it, just somehow stumbled around Bairro Alto and ended up there again. It was my last day in Lisbon, the day before I moved to Barcelona.
The girl was there again, with the bleached blond hair. Apparently she was a bartender at that bar.
“We’ve met before,” she said. “Some days ago. We spoke, remember? You were really drunk.”
This time we had an actual conversation, hung out with other people, took shots together, the whole nine. I noticed that she had, out of many, one particular tattoo on her left arm: three pixelated hearts, with two and a half filled in, as if she only had 2.5 lives left in an 8-bit video game.
It wasn’t until a few weeks later, when I was scrolling through some old photographs, I realized that I’d posted to my Instagram a random photo with a pixelated heart—“you are my internet crush.” I looked at the date of the photo and realized it was exactly one day before I met her.
Like I somehow knew I was going to meet her, this video game character.
I looked at her Instagram, and her moniker was “Mrs. Nobody.”
CAROLINA
I met Carolina the very next day. I landed in Barcelona and had rented a room from another American who happened to be out of town. My new roommates were a Brazilian woman named Dani and a Mexican artist named Carolina.
My room’s window opened up to our shared rooftop—the whole place was a smattering of white, of good energy, buena onda. I woke up that morning, sick from the flight, but reinvigorated to Carolina playing my favorite Brazilian album (the same one from which I had song lyrics tattooed on my arm) while she painted and drew on the roof.
She showed me her artwork later, and it consisted largely of colorful patterns and fanciful figures that were reminiscent of her Mexican heritage and also of a child’s mind—she used bright primary colors and pink shades, and she drew often with marker or colored pencil.
We spoke of coincidences. I told her many of my stories, and she shared some of hers—she bought into the coincidence thing, as she’d experienced many of her own in her life. We laughed about it.
When I told her about Isabella, from Lisbon, she mentioned that she was going to Lisbon for a friend’s birthday in a month, and that I should come with her. I wanted to see my friends from Lisbon again, and so I told her I just might, but that I’d think about it.
I said maybe I needed a sign, and she said, “but what if I’m the sign?”
A couple weeks later, I was walking near the Sagrada Familia and stopped short when I noticed a graffitied wall. It contained the words, written largely, covering almost the whole wall: “NEMO DAYS.”
“Nemo” is Latin for “nobody” and was the name of the title character in the film “Mr. Nobody.” I thought back to Isabella’s Instagram description: “Mrs. Nobody.” To make things even more of an odd coincidence, below the word “NEMO” on the Barcelona wall was the word “DAYS.” Isabella’s last name is “Dias,” which meant “days” in Portuguese.
I freaked out a little, and texted the photo to Carolina. “Now you definitely have to come to Lisbon,” she said.
LAURA
I met Laura in Spanish class.
I saw the Nemo graffiti on a wall when I was walking with Laura. It was close to where we both lived, and we had been on the way to the Sagrada Familia. I’d found a rooftop that was situated directly in front of the church, and it was one of the most beautiful views I’d ever seen. Probably more beautiful than the inside. And definitely more beautiful than looking at the church from ground level.
(As an aside, I found out about this rooftop from another Brazilian girl who I’d met in Porto a year prior–also the reason I went back to Porto a second time, during which I met David, mentioned above, who was the reason I met Isabella. Wacky.)
I stopped to tell Laura about how peculiar that graffiti wall was. I told her it reminded me exactly of someone I’d met in Lisbon.
Well, right after we went to the rooftop of Sagrada to have a drink, I also noticed something else. Laura carried a black backpack for school, and I’d seen it in class. It was a simple North Face backpack, standard. But I noticed inscribed at the bottom of the backpack was the word “ISABELLA” in caps.
“Why does your backpack say ‘Isabella?’” I asked Laura.
“I don’t know,” she said, “I think it’s just the name of a line that’s part of the brand.” I suppose the backpack was Isabella, by The North Face.
This was the week right before I went to Lisbon. All the signs pointed back to Lisbon.
But the actual coincidence about Laura, aside from all of the connections to Lisbon and Isabella, was that she was largely connected to me, fundamentally, and my past.
Laura is Italian—but Laura isn’t a traditionally Italian name. In fact, it’s more Spanish or American than anything. When I was in middle school, so about 10 years old, I took my first Spanish class ever, in the States, in Michigan. We all had to pick Spanish names. I didn’t go for Maria or Juana or some other popular, easy to pronounce name. I went for “Laura.” More of an American name, even, than Spanish. And yet when we could all choose our own Spanish name, at 10 years old, I had picked “Laura,” only to work so hard to pronounce it (you had to roll the R pretty severely) and lamenting that everyone else had a nice little cute Spanish-sounding name, like Rosa. I spent that whole year wishing I’d picked a different Spanish name.
Taking Spanish class again for the first time after all these years, especially in Barcelona, and meeting Laura was like coming to terms again with myself. As if my 10-year-old self knew I would meet her.
But that wasn’t all. When I was around that age, maybe a year younger, in the fourth grade, I had been tasked with drawing fruit with charcoal colors. I picked apples. My work impressed my art teacher so much that she displayed my charcoal drawing in a high school art show – and when my parents brought me to the show, she immediately told them that I should become a surgeon when I grow up because of how talented my hands were.
On the very last day I ever saw Laura, we were about to take the bus to the Bunkers, and to escape the heat while waiting for the bus, we ducked into a convenience store. In the store she looked around, asked me what my favorite book was.
I told her it was a book by Murakami, a surrealist writer. And that I especially lived a surreal life, full of meaningful coincidences. I told her about the apple in Croatia.
“You know my last name,” she said, “has to do with apples.”
I later looked up the translation to English from Italian, and the meaning of her last name is “apple tree.”
LISBON
Finally, I ended up going to Lisbon with Carolina. I actually ended up taking Carolina to Isabella’s bar, and they met very briefly.
A couple days later, I went back to the bar alone, the last time I would ever see Isabella.
“You know the girl I came with,” I told Isabella, “I knew I would meet her before I met her. Just like I knew I’d meet you before I met you.”
“How?”
“I recently discovered a box of colored pencils I’d bought my first week here in Lisbon, from Flying Tiger. I’d never bought colored pencils before but for some reason felt compelled to. This was right before I met Carolina, who’s an illustrator for children’s books and uses a lot of colored pencil in her drawings.”
A day later, I told Carolina this story, and she sent over a photo of her own Flying Tiger supplies that she’d been using on the bus ride over to Lisbon, from Barcelona.
. . .