Some coincidences are unnerving, because they make you see in them the implication of living forces at work, sinister forces, relentless and domineering. Most of the time, as long as you aren’t personally invested in what happened, you are able to realize it was just bad luck. On occasion, mentalist tricks are involved, which can’t easily be overcome with analysis since their victim remains in a state of shock, having read metaphysical or supernatural meanings to an all too human sleight of hand.
I will always remember one boy’s expression. He was arguing with a conman professing to be a magician, and looked like he was struck by lighting when the other told him that the spirits revealed to him how the boy’s troubles “begun with his sister”. What a good example of the mentalist’s tricks, and also of their recklessness; if the boy had a sister, it’d be quite likely that antagonisms in infancy left a deep mark. If he had not, the trickster stood to lose nothing since the other was already his critic.
But the effect is much worse and far more difficult to dispel, when there never existed any party that stood to gain out of tricking you. When you tricked yourself.
There was this girl, in late middle school. Her trusting parents left her under the very loose supervision of her grandmother, when they went for a short trip to another city. The girl was into reading magical lore and had her friends over to organize some type of ceremony in which they’d cast spells to summon a friendly demon.
That night, on a road hundreds of kilometers away, in the tail-end of a series of collisions initiated by a drunk driver running circles around the other cars as if he was dribbling novice defenders at some exhibition, the car with her parents was smashed, killing them both. When news reached her, she thought her magical ceremony was the reason.
When you are hit by a bolt out of the blue, you can be stupefied. One might ask, how come those bolts are there, and moreover how can they hit precisely at the time you are the most exposed? The question itself is a reverse of the answer. The bolts are there because nothing special has to happen for them to be there, and they hit at the most opportune time to deliver a crashing blow since that’s the only time you’d register them as bolts out of the blue.
In reality, we are always surrounded by the potential for tragedy, and as a fail-safe deep below our conscious thoughts our mind is teaming with every sort of morbid retrospection which on a moment’s notice will burst forward, will grab us lest we fall on an abyss of fright or pain. And we’ll hold on to this unexpected ally, preferring to pay the towering toll for its services than have it dissipate and reveal the same abyss.
I think that we built an entire world by accident, just to repress the memory of free-fall.