Which evening will change your life?
Desire: Part IV — Coincidence | On doorknobs, detours, and the afterlife of attachment
If a coincidence is defined by its lack of premeditation, it reminds us that we cannot fully orchestrate what or who enters our lives, or when—that desire often reveals itself through what we could not have recognized or anticipated.
We often cast desire as a force that derails a life, jolting it off course, but the truth is that it offers both escape routes and doorknobs. These so-called detours might be the point.
A few months ago, I went to a party at a friend’s house in London. Because most of us were transplants and the group skewed artsy, academic, and existentially curious, a simple question—what brought you to London?—often answered with a boyfriend, fiancé, husband, or ex, quickly deepened into a conversation about desire, relationships, culture, and place. Men may have prompted the plot twist (dating as armchair travel, then actual travel), but what unfolded from there was sprawling and surprising.
As we stood in the galley kitchen, drinking wine and picking at a charcuterie board, I thought about how it is not possible to disentangle the story of our lives, from other people and the paths they’ve led us down. People move for love; they move in the wake of its ruins. Desire determines direction. It forces questions of change and chance. Desire disrupts the narrative. It can reorganize a whole life.
Perhaps what we think of as a series of accumulating coincidences is really attachment and its afterlife: the meet-cute with your college boyfriend because the elevator in your apartment building broke down; going to a party on a crisp September night in Toronto and meeting the stranger who would become your best friend (she was in her post-breakup yes-woman era); gearing up to move to New York City and imagining yourself single and dating around, only for your resolve to disintegrate when an old flame reaches out. It is developing a mounting love affair with London when the plan was supposed to be to fall in love in New York—with New York. (For the record, I do love New York, but I love London more, so I took up with the mistress.)
It is the way a breakup sparks a desire for reinvention like moving country or chopping off your hair (I am, admittedly, more attached to my hair than my sense of place), and the flat next door to your best friend becoming available. It is taking it as a sign that the universe has conspired to will you in a particular direction, even though you do not believe everything happens for a reason, nor do you identify as a spiritual person on principle (if we’re talking astrology-as-truth or spirit guides; although by now you can probably tell I am perpetually and compulsively searching for meaning), and having the good sense to act on the coincidence.
In graduate school, I learned that great fiction should end in a way that is both surprising yet inevitable. In conversations with friends, I learned that people often think desire—and love—should feel the same: surprising in the moment, yet inevitable in hindsight. But perhaps it is not any particular love that comes to define us so much as the accumulation of intimacies through which we come to understand the story of our lives.
We cannot accurately foresee what will come of our romantic entanglements—whether they will endure or fall apart, or where they will lead us. Perhaps to a new city, some new insight, or a new version of the self. But time has a way of zooming us out from events, allowing us to trace the connections between them. Only in retrospect do we become skilled at arranging coincidence into narrative.
I thought about my Tube ride earlier that Saturday evening: people sipping from canned cocktails, clutching bottles of wine, or already tearing open boxes of beer to crack a bottle en route to their destinations. I thought about how the pursuit of alcohol is often intertwined with the pursuit of desire, how it makes us more open, more willing to act on a feeling, and therefore more likely to stumble into coincidence. (Open alcohol is prohibited in Toronto and New York City, so there is something gloriously illicit about it to me, even still.) Maybe they were heading to parties where they would meet a beautiful stranger? Maybe the girl they’d start talking to in the restaurant bathroom would become their best friend? I imagined the desires that shaped their lives so far and the coincidences that awaited them: how they might change the course of an evening—or the course of a life.
I’ve been going to Wilton’s Way Deli & Wines a lot lately, which makes you feel like you’re hanging on someone’s patio. They also do a really good Aperol spritz. This song came on when I was last there and I immediately Shazamed it so I could add it to my July playlist. The same evening, I went to the new spot East2West on Broadway Market for dinner which was delicious and provides ample people watching opportunities.
I had a haircut in Chelsea the day the new Gracie Abrams album came out, which is impeccably titled Daughter From Hell, so I listened to it on the Tube ride over. I have thoughts…but I haven’t listened enough yet to say anything definitive. An aside, but as you will have learned above, I am, indeed, attached to my hair, and Oli from The Hair Bros kills it every time. If you’re an air-dry girlie who also dreads the overheating and arm exhaustion that comes with blow-drying, I think you’d like their approach. Plus, the salon backs onto The Chelsea Gardener, so you feel more like a bonsai tree being pruned than a human in a chaotic salon.
If you haven’t read it already, I’d recommend reading Jia Tolentino’s new essay, “Our Plastic-Surgery Nightmare” and then following it up with “The New Female Contempt” by my friend Alistair Kitchen. As always, if you have thoughts, send them my way.
See you next Sunday for Desire: Part V. Here’s everything I’ve published in the series so far: