I don’t know how to articulate this thing that happened. My original email to the person in question may be enough. Hopefully it’s comprehensible:

It’s pretty insane and probably not believable, but I will tell you what happened. The other day I was thinking about people I had interacted with online but had never met. You were one of them of course. We emailed quite regularly but we hadn’t been in contact in a while. So I searched through our emails and saw that it had been years!!!! Anyway, this is not the crazy part. I tried sending you an email, but it got rejected. It seems you no longer have [email address redacted]. So I resigned myself to probably never hearing from you again. The same day !!!!!!  — this is the absolutely bonkers part and you may not believe this but it 100% happened and it is making me question my whole sense of reality and beyond — the same day… I was checking addresses on postcards. When the cards come down from Timbuktu, I verify that the addresses are correctly written before sending them on to the Bamako post office. There was a card addressed to [your name]. When I am verifying the addresses, it’s fairly mindless and I am not paying much attention. I will copy the name of the person in the spreadsheet that I had sent to Ali and then I will paste it into shopify to mark the item as fulfilled. When I pasted your name, something clicked. I looked at the card and sure enough it was your name. Then I saw it was addressed to Washington state. I had remembered you had one time talked about taking a flight from Seattle to Nairobi. So then I emailed [the person who ordered the card] and here we are. I have had some wild experiences in my life, crazy moments on psychedelic drugs, lucid dreams, insane coincidences, but this is up there and it really blew me away. 

A perhaps more comprehensible version: I tried to get in contact with a long lost internet friend. The email bounced. Address no longer valid. The same day, I was verifying physical mail addresses on postcards that arrived in Bamako from Timbuktu. While Ali does all the work up in Timbuktu, writing the addresses and the messages with the team, I log them as shipped in our Shopify account once they arrive in Bamako. While doing this, I came across the name of this long lost internet friend. Could it be her? After seeing it was addressed to the same US state where I believed she lived, I contacted the postcard sender for more info. After we were confident enough that it was indeed the same person, the postcard sender gave my email address to my long lost internet friend so she could decide whether to contact me. AND IT WAS HER! And she wrote to me! And we are now back in contact! This all happened within the same day!!!!

This happened on December 5th 2022. It’s still rattling my brain over 6 months later.

This is not the first time I’ve experienced something that leaves me staggering around with a kind of cerebral vertigo. But it is high on the list. To give you an idea, learning about trees communicating with each other using underground fungal networks (AMAZING! ASTONISHING!) is way down on that list in comparison.

It’s a coincidence, right? Yea, I have a hard time believing that. That’s a lot of atoms and electrons to line up just right. At the same time, I don’t have any belief system that can help me process it. You would think this would be one of those things that would push the needle in that direction. A firm challenge to years of agnosticism. Yes? No?

How do you reconcile experiencing something unfathomable without any corresponding evolution of belief? It appears I’m fully capable of sitting with the feeling of awe and astonishment without making any headway on this.

Genuine astonishment aside, why am I sharing this? I’m sure you’ve had similarly unexplainable moments in your own life.

I do believe that If I hadn’t thought of my long lost internet friend before I started checking the postcards, I would have glossed over her name and none of this would have ever happened. A light was on in a dark corner of my brain and it ended up revealing something in the real world that would have otherwise floated on by.

I met my long lost internet friend through this blog, which I had neglected for years along with many of the great relationships that formed directly or indirectly because of it. This crazy thing that happened triggered a course correction. Nine days after it happened I wrote my first post in over 6 months. Now I’ve written more posts in two months than I have in 4 years.

The right hemisphere of my brain is working again! I’m back babY! (frank costanza voice). And I’m cooking up a few things.