How Choosing to Believe in the Coincidental has Made My Life a Little Bit Better
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About four years ago, I lost a close friend to suicide, and I blamed myself for it.
Of course, there was no possible way that his death could have been my fault, but there was a part of me that would never let me fully believe that. So, I shoved that entire situation down.
In hindsight, this was a horrible idea, and I probably should have just gone to therapy a lot sooner than I did. Either way, the feeling of guilt that I had tried to squash down all those years ago had reappeared, and it had begun to take over my life.
During my freshman year of college, I found comfort in the fact that I could leave whenever I wanted, and that I could go wherever I wanted as well.
This brought me to Walmart at around two in the morning on a Wednesday.
I didn’t need anything from Walmart. I’m not even sure if I ended up getting something at all. Nothing physical, at least. Because I did get a story to tell that I have thought about at least twice a week over the past year and a half.
I had wandered into the aisle filled with boxes of tea, and I’d decided that I would pick some up. Maybe spearmint.
I had been touching my box of spearmint tea for half of a second before I knocked it off the shelf, along with about seven other boxes. How I did this remains a mystery to me.
There was another woman in the aisle, so she immediately dived down to help me pick up the tea boxes. All I could say to her was, “I’m sorry! Wow, I have no idea how that happened. Thank you.”
She told me, “It’s okay, it’s okay.”
When I said, “I’m sorry,” again, she stopped picking up the boxes, and looked right up at me. I wasn’t expecting this kind of intense eye contact, so my only choice was to stop cleaning as well. She then said to me, “You know it isn’t your fault, right?”
Logically, I know that this woman was only saying this because she felt bad for the teenager that was apologizing profusely to her on the floor of a Walmart at two in the morning because of some ninety-nine cent tea boxes, but I did not take it that way.
