Of Chances and Waiting

(See prior related entry: A Rainy Day and Monday)

“Chance and chance alone has a message for us. Everything that occurs out of necessity, everything expected, repeated day in and day out, is mute.”

Those are lines from Milan Kundera’s Unbearable Lightness of Being – the very book that I readily purchased (when I found out that it was on sale) while waiting for a schoolmate.

Kundera could never be more correct. My seeing Him again was a product of several chances, of fortuitous events. I was to meet this schoolmate at SM. However, it happened that she would be doing a project in Sasa, so we agreed to meet at 5 p.m. in NBS-Gmall.

At around 10 minutes to 5, I entered NBS. I directly went to the fiction section, looking around for some book to purchase. Then I saw the Kundera book. I picked it up and paid for it. While waiting for my schoolmate, I checked some board games, magazines, and ended up in the children’s books section.

It happened that I looked up (I was reading a children’s book) and saw a familiar face. I took a second look and realized that it was really him. He was in a pink shirt and blue jeans instead of the white polo and black slacks that he used to wear a few months back.

He is something new from the old, of what has been forgotten. My friend and I happened to see this beautiful soul, as we call him, last year while waiting for our hard-bound theses. We know this guy’s name and that he is a Bagger Guy – nothing more. With due respect to all bagger guys out there, we could not reconcile his beautiful face and very fair skin with his job.

And so we began idealizing him: he is a molecular biology student from UP, Gaisano’s son, a person who wants to live the life of a bagger guy. After seeing him again in NBS by chance, he is now an existentialist, a Kundera and Nietzsche-reading Bagger Guy.

As Kundera puts it, my friend and I transform the fortuitous occurrence into a motif, which then assumes a permanent place in the composition of those moments of our lives when we have to WAIT.