Three Best Friends. Reunited By Pure, Inexplicable Fate.

It was 2017 and life was good. I had spent the year traveling, and now I was headed for Coachella with my best friend Hailey to celebrate her birthday, and we were going to see our other best friend, Angie, at the festival (though she was with her college friends). Hailey flew in from New York, I drove down from San Francisco, and we planned to car camp.

I wish I had pictures of our camp. We were able to get up our EZ canopy, but failed miserably at pitching a tent. I think we ended up taping two ends of the tent to the trunk of my car, which we propped open overnight and tucked the other ends under our mattress on the floor. So we had a sort of open-air situation. But that's not what I want to talk about. This story is one about how the universe makes it so obvious that certain people are meant to be in your life.

Friday night, we had a plan. Vince Staples at the Coachella Stage. TroyBoi at the Sahara Stage. SZA back at Coachella Stage to close the night. Our ambition got the best of us, and we had found ourselves close to the front of the stage at Vince Staples. Wrong choice, as it quickly became overwhelming. As soon as the set ended, we knew we had to get out—fast.

I grabbed Hailey’s hand, and we dove into the crowd, weaving, pushing, sorry-ing our way through thousands of people. Thirty minutes of this, and I finally popped up on my tiptoes to check our progress.

We had barely made a dent.

Defeated, I turned to Hailey. We were stuck. I explained it was time to accept our fate, take some deep breaths, and try to survive the next set from right here.

For good measure, I turned around one more time to see if there was any way we could make it out, but I stopped abruptly when I saw—standing right next to me, in a crowd of thousands—Angie.

Surely I was hallucinating. Had I fully dissociated?

No. It was her. The three of us looked at each other, speechless.

In a crowd of thousands, we had somehow—without a single call, text, or coordinated move—ended up in the exact same spot.

Three best friends. Reunited by pure, inexplicable fate.

Years later—on my 23rd birthday, and after a decade of friendship--a blowout argument in the middle of bumfuck nowhere France ended things between Hailey and me. Just like that. But stories like this make me wonder. About fate, about timing, about the way people weave in and out of our lives. And about Hailey—whether she was meant to be a passing chapter or if, in some way I can’t yet see, our story isn’t over.