The Rachael Coincidence

How many stories have you read, true or otherwise, that start out saying that what you are about to read is absolutely true? I’ve read a bunch of those kinds of stories and I typically want to believe them, but it can be difficult. The situations don’t have to be completely outlandish, but sometimes the coincidence factor may be a bit too convenient – like the timing of an occurrence was altered just a bit to make for a better read. Writers can ultimately create anything they want in their stories, so the onus is on the reader to decide if what they are reading is really accurate: Unless the author has a witness.

What you are about to read is absolutely true.

I’m sitting in a house that is fifteen minutes from Laguna’s main beach on a Thursday afternoon. The front door is open and an occasional breeze hits my leg as I stare at the laptop in front of me. Wes is on the brown leather love seat about five feet to my right. He is pricing used vehicles on his laptop and intermittently looking up at the Carl Sagan documentary that is playing on the wall-mounted plasma screen television directly across from us. I am in the red pleather chair under the wet bar next to the kitchen doorway and writing an overdue chapter for my previous blog – soon to be book. Throughout that particular story I frequently mention my girlfriend and how much I love and miss her, but I never explained how we met. The rough version of the, “How We Met,” chapter begins with me describing the terrible condition I was in and the tragedies that befell me prior to that amazing event. It takes me about fifteen minutes or so to get through the introduction and then I start explaining the moment that I first saw Rachael. I could write about her all day, but I‘ve only just begun describing that first glance. Butterflies.

The scenario playing in my brain is highly romanticized and reminds me of one of our favorite movies: The Royal Tenenbaums. You know that scene where Gwyneth Paltrow gets off the Greenline bus and that Nico song, “These Days” starts playing while everything is in Wes Anderson-trademark slow motion? She and Luke Wilson look at each other as she walks toward him and everything about the sequence conjures feelings of true love. That’s what I’m thinking/daydreaming about when Wes strikes up the shuffle function on his I-tunes. Which song starts playing? You guessed it.

See? It doesn’t have to be an unbelievable premise. Coincidences occur all the time and can serve as entertaining stories. I’m just glad I had a witness.