they say the universe works in mysterious ways

the strangest thing happened tonight (altho there is a longer story, let's call it the 'pre-amble' that needs to be told)........

my first time on internet dating i met a guy who i emailed with for a few days and just before the time i would normally suggest meeting up (or actually the time when i would hope they would take the initiative and ask me if i'd like to meet up) he told me that he'd met someone else and that he wouldn't feel right about seeing us both - i was cool with that, altho disappointed as he seemed kinda nice.....

anyway, a year or so passed, and i never really forgot about him - wasn't like we'd had anything special - i just kinda liked him (at least the online email version of him) and i thought it would have been nice if we'd met.....he would occasionally pop into my head and i would wonder how he was getting on and hope that perhaps one day we might reconnect.....

so it's a week after i get back from paris and i'm getting my hair done - the girl sitting next to me (also looking like something from another planet with foil protruding from her head at odd angles) starts chatting to me - we do the small talk thing 'hi i'm sarah', 'hi i'm anne' and then she starts telling me that she can see me in a garden - a french garden - that of an artist - i start thinking how weird this is as i was in fact in Monet's garden (yes, french impressionist artist Claude Monet of waterlily fame) only 10 days or so ago........i get goosebumps as she's telling me this. then she says casually 'oh someone nice will come into your life tonight, his name will be peter'. I rack my brain - only Peter I can think of is my boss who has a partner - so I figure she is talking complete and utter rubbish!!!

so you can imagine my surprise when at one minute past midnight that very night, the boy from internet dating (his name is Peter) sends me an email titled 'Hi, we chatted once, a long time ago.....'

soooo we email a bit, have a phone call or two and then finally some one year and five months after we originally started chatting on the internet, meet up......we have a wonderful evening, he asks me out again and i think this could be the start of something nice :-)

we date for a few months and for a variety of reasons it doesn't work out, but neither of us seems capable of really moving on......we end up trying to date again a few months later but seems like we are actually better as friends......then we don't see each other for a while other than as friends (which is going really well - at least i think it is) but he says he wants more - i figure after trying two or three times already, and nothing having changed that it's probably not going to work.......so we kinda don't see each other for a while (here's me assuming we are still friends) and then i don't hear from him for months on end

so it's now 2008 and i haven't heard from him in 7 months and i think, ok i'll send an email to see how he's getting on - no response, no reply, nothing, nada! i figure i have his email address wrong and send him a text.............the response is this:

"Sarah, I'm sorry but you must accept that i feel friendship isn't sustainable for us. Because I always thought about having more than just that. In the end I realised my pretending otherwise is not good for anyone. That's why I'm not available. I figured you got that as well. I just can't be what you would like because we can't be anything else. I tried. But I can't. I need more".......

in some ways a nice compliment but in another way disappointing - he had become someone who's company I really enjoyed, someone i loved going to the movies with and just hanging out with and someone I trusted and felt comfortable with :-) oh well, I respect his choice and I hope that in time he will find what he is looking for......

now to the bit about the universe moving in mysterious ways as you have by now patiently (or not!) read this and I can hear you saying 'where is she going with all of this?'..........well tonight i had dinner with my best friend and her little boy. they kindly (or stupidly) offered to pick me up in town so we could drive to my place and get dinner at our fave mexican takeaway place.........so as we are sitting (and i mean literally sitting in traffic) on Park St in between Pitt and George streets, I tell her about Peter's text to me and as she's reading it, I look up to see him, yes Peter, the one who wrote the text, the one I haven't seen or heard from in 7 months, walks right in front of the car.............

how weird is that?????