Synchronicities

“He said he was into self-help, but when I mentioned Wayne Dyer, he drew a blank, and that’s how I knew he wasn’t my soul mate.”

I had forgotten all about the guy who moseyed up to me over avocados at Vons last September until last week, when I decided to scroll back through my timeline on Twitter and read what I’d tweeted around this time last year.

 I never went out with him--I don’t remember why--and promptly forgot about the entire incident.

Fast forward to Thursday. My friends and I were at breakfast, a local little hole-in-the-wall restaurant that serves foods like quinoa, green juice, and organic flax smoothies but has terrible service, is too hot to be comfortable, and has too many flies to be completely sanitary.

It’s my favorite place to eat off last night’s bad decisions.

My friend received a text from her crush, a simple message that said nothing and everything at the same time: the tongue emoji. 

“What does this mean?” she asked. I didn’t know what it meant per se but we both knew there was some sort of innuendo there that wasn’t necessarily appropriate for such a new relationship.

We spent a good half hour trying to decide what to text back. Something that had no obvious or even obscure connotation. 

“Well definitely not a peach,” we agreed.

We scrolled through every single emoji on either of our phones, until we landed on what we thought was the perfect response to derail an inappropriate remark: a paper clip.

We mulled the potential hidden meanings of a paperclip but found none.

Later that day my handyman showed up to determine why my closet doors kept coming off their tracks. He poked around for no more than five minutes, then told me the reason the doors were having problems was because something had jammed the tracks. He held up the culprit: a paper clip.

There came my day, seemingly unconnected events, full circle. 

I went to the grocery store that evening and passed the peaches. I snickered as I picked one up., remembering the earlier conversation I'd had with my friend.

And that was when a guy in a suit walked over and asked me if I thought they'd be good peaches.

“Well I believe it’s too early in the year for peaches. You’d have to wait a couple of weeks, and then you have to feel the peach. If it’s soft, it’ll be juicy and you’ll enjoy it. But see this one? It’s hard and you’ll regret the moment you bite into it.” I told him.

“You know, this sounds like a wildly inappropriate conversation for the grocery store, but it is really just an innocent conversation about peaches,” he told me. We chatted a little more. He noted my sass factor and said, “you’re trouble, my mom warned me about girls like you.” And then he somehow wove into the conversation that he does gratitude walks and is into self-help.

“Oh, me, too! I watched a Wayne Dyer video just this morning,” I said.

“Who?”

And that’s when I realized that the guy who was hitting on me (rather calculatedly, in hindsight) over peaches at Barrons was the same guy who hit on me over avocados at Vons a year ago. He had no idea he’d used the same lines on me a year before at a different store. 

“What’s your name?” he asked, holding out his hand to shake mine.

“Kelli with an ‘I’.”

“Oh, you love saying that, don’t you? I’m Brett. With two ts.” He said, which I already knew because we’d been here before. 

I will note here that I haven’t quite mastered the art of telling a guy “no thanks” when he asks for my number, even if I have no intention of dating him, because I just hate the thought of making him feel rejected. I guess I’d rather he feel rejected over text than to face-to-face.

He handed me his phone to put in my number, and I prayed it was a new phone and the awkwardness of his discovering he’d already ran his game on me wouldn’t come to light.

But no. I punched in my number, and there popped up, “Kelly Vons.”

“Oh. Apparently we already know each other.” I said, feigning surprise. “But you spelled my name wrong.”

“Oh, I’ll have to change that.” He didn’t seem too embarrassed.

“And also change Vons to Barrons,” I winked. “I have to finish my shopping now.”

He texted later that night, asked what plans I had over the weekend.

“It was fun running into you, but to be honest you’re too young for me.  Nevertheless, I look forward to our connecting over the produce at Sprouts some point in the future.” Was my response.

I didn’t hear from him after that, but somehow, I don’t think the Grocery Store Dating Bandit is going to be deterred from running his game and using cheesy pick-up lines in aisle 4 at the grocery store.  

Fair enough, as I shall not be deterred from analyzing how the events of the day came full circle and trying to figure out what it all means in the grand scheme of things, if it means anything at all...