Tuesday 24 January 2012

The series of accidents? Short story of a meeting.




On the Saturday Morning in Warsaw, K. was complaining to her boyfriend T. over the phone. Her friends got stoned the night before and they acted up. He decided to get on the evening train from Poznan, where he lived, and come over.
In the afternoon in Konin, M. thought he’d to go to Warsaw and visit a girl that he had seen just once.
Same afternoon, same town, I was packing my suitcase, planning to get to the airport in Warsaw later that night. My friends were late, so I double checked the train just to find out it was cancelled, and I had to catch the earlier one. It meant eight hours of waiting alone at the airport.
By mutual friend, M. found out that I was also leaving that evening, so we met up at the train station. We got on the train, where I spotted T. passing by the compartment. He wanted to have a cigarette and walked down the wagon. We got to Warsaw together where K. picked us up, and M. had left to meet up with his girl/friend. It was a beautiful night, it was snowing and the three of us went to the pub on Nowy Świat. It wasn’t even for a second beer, when T. got a call from M. saying that the meeting wasn’t really what he thought it would be and he wanted to join us. He showed up twenty minutes later.

Now - if K’s friends didn’t get stoned and acted up, she wouldn’t have called T. and he wouldn’t have decided to come over. If M. didn’t want to see the girl, if my train wasn’t cancelled, if the mutual friend hadn’t told M. about me leaving, if T. didn’t decide to have a cigarette and walk down the wagon, if I hadn’t spotted him, if M’s wouldn’t turn out to be a disaster…if any of these things would have gone differently I would ended up waiting at the airport alone.
But as Benjamin Button said Sometimes we’re on collision Course and we just don’t know it. Whether it’s by accident or design there’s not a thing we can do about it.
We drank a bit that night and I made it to the airport way later than I assumed I would.