It was 3AM outside Circle K, The world was fogged in—thick, glowing mist wrapping the parking lot in a soft halo. It wasn’t cold. Not for that hour. Not for that time of year. It was Chinese New Year—the Year of the Fire Horse—and the air felt charged, like something invisible was humming just beneath the surface.
I stood there with a my elf cup full of coffee warming your hands, waiting for a ride to Oakville.
Gamma rays. Quantum frequencies. The idea that the mind, if tuned just right, could brush up against impossible realities and pull them through like static resolving into a signal. I wondered if thoughts were magnets. If certain memories bent probability the way gravity bends light.
Oakville.
The year 2000.
I was canvassing neighborhoods—knocking on doors, clipboard in hand, rehearsed smile ready. I knocked on one house, ordinary like the rest. The door opened.
The guy looked at you for half a second and said Shaun Fickling
Not just my first name.
My full name.
Like he’d been expecting me.
I hadn’t seen him in years.
“Come in,” he said casually, like you were late for something already in progress.
I stepped inside. Sat down. The house felt like a crossroads disguised as a living room.
A few minutes later, the front door opened again. In walked a guy from Grade—just casually entering like this was the most normal thing in the world.
Then, as if the universe was layering coincidences on top of each other, one of my best friends from high school in Stratford walked in.
No planning. No group chat. No warning.
Just people from completely different chapters of your life converging in one suburban house in Oakville like timelines collapsing into a single point.
I remember thinking even then: This doesn’t feel random.
Years later, I was in a Boston Pizza in Camrose. I'm a few drinks in. The TV is on. MuchMusic is playing in the background, which is Canada's version of MTV, back in the day when they actually played music
I glanced up.
And there he is.
The Oakville guy.
On TV.
With Grade.
I actually said it out loud: “What the heck?”
Like the universe had just winked at me again.
He joined the band.
Of course he did.
Because why wouldn’t the improbable become ordinary?
And that wasn’t the only time. I kept running into him in strange places—cities that didn’t overlap, situations that made no statistical sense. The kind of coincidences that make you feel like reality isn’t a straight line but a web—and some people are glowing nodes you’re magnetically pulled toward.
Back outside the Circle K, the fog thickened, swirling under the streetlights like slow-motion smoke. The parking lot felt suspended outside of time. No traffic. No wind. Just that hum.
I thought about frequency again.
What if certain thoughts tune you to certain people? What if memory is a broadcast tower? What if impossible realities don’t break the rules—what if they simply operate at a different bandwidth?
The Fire Horse year. Fire is energy. Horse is movement. Momentum meeting ignition.
I wasn't cold. I wasn't bored. I was aware.
Aware that my life seemed to bend in strange arcs. Aware that some people reappear like recurring symbols in a dream. Aware that maybe—just maybe—the quantum mind isn’t about science fiction.
Maybe it’s about attention.
Maybe when I stand still at 3AM, coffee in hand, wrapped in fog, thinking about gamma rays and attraction and impossible odds, I'm not waiting for a ride to Oakville.
Maybe I'm waiting for the next convergence point.
And somewhere, in another parking lot, under another streetlight, probability is already shifting.
