Chapter 30 - Endings Begin

Coincidence Speaks

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Happy Equinox, friends! Welcome to Chapter 30, the final chapter of Coincidence Speaks. If you are new here, please head this way to start at the beginning↩️ for the full experience.

Whew… it’s been a ride. Looking forward to writing a Thank You/Postscript as so many of you have meant and continue to mean so much to this creative endeavor—For now I cannot express enough gratitude.

Paul took a steadying breath, and that essence spoke from deep within:

“Check the Commute to Horizon Trust.”

He obliged and pulled up his GPS. A picturesque thirty minute ride through winding country roads. No highways. No traffic.

“Hm.. not bad. Not bad at all…”

He decided then and there to reach out to see if there was an employment opportunity at Horizon Trust. But first, he would need to get his vision checked.

Onward to the conclusion of Coincidence Speaks…

Chapter 30

Endings Begin

Paul Endrum poured out of his car, looking forward to seeing Dr. Q for the first time in years. It didn’t take an expensive watch around his wrist to tell him he was on time. Time wasn’t told, not anymore; in fact it had never been fixed in the first place.

An unbound journal lay in the passenger seat, open to two scribbled words: “Horizon Trust.” The same one that had traveled with him since he’d started tracking the rapid changes in his health condition nearly a decade ago. Over the course of the past year, it had slowly but surely become the source material for a book he was writing.

Light, surefooted steps glided towards the entrance, his mind quiet and attentive, open senses taking in all the little nuances and changes to the office property over the years. He’d known Dr. Q for more than thirty of them—they’d first met when Paul was a myopic 8-year-old boy in the second grade, who had no idea how nearsighted he was because he thought everyone else saw everything blurring together just like he did.

Just after his tenth birthday, Paul had gotten a shard of sand lodged in his eye during recess at school. The cut quickly turned into a corneal ulcer, leading to a blotch of growing blindness right in the middle of his dominant eye. Thanks to Dr. Q’s quick action and immediate surgery, she’d narrowly preserved Paul’s vision.

Unbeknownst to either of them, she was about to do so again.

Dr. Q’s broad smile lit up the waiting room as she strode out to greet Paul, her face illuminated with genuine excitement to see him. One of the most enthusiastic and encouraging people he’d ever known, her presence alone felt familiar and reassuring.

Something seemed different about her now though… beneath her bubbly extroverted personality was something he’d never noticed before. “She’s tough—like really tough. This woman is a spiritual powerhouse!”

He’d always assumed Dr. Q was just one of those rare, inordinately happy unicorn personalities that seemed unflappable no matter what life threw at them. Now, Paul could sense her soul had been forged through hard-won trust because he could plainly feel her resolute sense of courage and purpose—it was positively radiating out of her. He couldn’t help but feel a rising excitement, a growing sense of destiny unfolding.

Dr. Q ushered him down a narrow hallway to the office in the furthest corner of the building. 

“Last room on the left!” she chirped.

Paul and Dr. Q launched into an animated conversation about their families and current events, and Paul shared how he was well into an open-ended midlife sabbatical, how he was so blessed to be able to spend quality time with his kids while they were still young, how he had just started to play live music out in public, and how he was working on a book about the hidden marvels of the human nervous system after coming through an epic “come to Jesus” style health crisis. 

He worked hard to paint all of it with the brush of optimism, like he still had everything under some semblance of control—sharing everything but the truth of his growing isolation and disillusionment. The truth that never had he felt more untethered, more alone, than in daring to follow the pull of his own soul.

Fortunately Dr. Q wasn’t fooled. Not for a second.

They were still chatting away while she checked his vision through that giant pretzel-shaped prescription apparatus all eye doctors have, “It’s actually called a phoropter,” she was saying, when—

Something in the air shifted.

The atmosphere of the tiny 10x10 office cell transformed, suspended in breath-stopping stillness—and an all-encompassing sense of expansive depth, of spaciousness fully embraced Paul once more. It was as if the ceiling had blown right off the top of the office building and the sky itself was pouring in all around, shimmering and porous. Everything shifted—dreamlike in essence, but somehow much brighter, more real—pulsing with lucid, living potential… life in liquid flow…

Dr. Q stopped the eye exam in mid-sentence, raising her eyebrows.

“Oh my God,” Paul realized, “she feels it too!”

She craned her head slightly, listening intently, cocking one ear to the side like a curious puppy. Nodding once, she turned back to him with a calm, matter of fact tone.

“Paul, God is talking to me right now. He says he wants me to pray over you. Pray for you. Is that OK?”

Paul’s hitherto mundane world of battery issues and bank research disappeared into a clear blue sky, ancient memories with little bearing now, and he dropped deeper and deeper into the feeling of adventure, a purity of potential that anything could happen. And who was he to turn down a prayer—so, still a bit shell-shocked by this abrupt turn of events, he managed a shaky, “Sure…”

Followed by a more emphatic, “Thank you!”

Dr. Q placed her hand on Paul’s shoulder and began praying over him. But she cut off after only a few seconds, raising her eyebrows again.

“I’m getting the sense that something is about to be… born… somehow. Like there’s some kind of protective bubble or womb around you. Wait… a specific word is coming through. I don’t know what it means but... oh yeah, that’s definitely the word.” She laughed. “God is saying, ‘Don’t worry he’ll know what I mean.’”

Paul looked at her, speechless, thinking, “What? God? Are you freaking serious?” 

Then she looked straight into his eyes, point blank, and said, 

“Horizon.”

She paused, and Paul’s breath caught in the indefinable boundary between inbreath and outbreath, beginning and end. Then she spoke again:

“Yes, that’s the word, I’m sure of it. And there’s something else, another word that goes with it too… it’s like…. a surrender to something new. It feels like a leap of faith… into a sunrise, a new dawn.”

She paused again, listening intently.

“Yes! That’s it. It’s ‘trust.’”

She smiled.

“Horizon Trust. That’s what He’s is saying—I’m sure of it.”

Paul gawked at her, the gaping maw of his mouth wide enough to drive an armored bank truck through.  

“I can’t believe this,” one part of his brain muddled away at first, as usual, trying and failing to calculate the incredible odds.

“My God,” breathless words spilled out to Dr. Q, “I’ve been feeling so stuck and so exhausted lately, and I literally just asked for insight on the next step forward, and there’s this bank that just kind of dropped out of the sky as a possibility just now, and right before I got here I was even looking up the commute. To Horizon Trust!”

Dr. Q just smiled. Paul shot one back, in a daze. 

In the next moment, their attention was drawn together like a tractor beam to the sole picture in that office, dangling just a little lopsided on the wall behind them. It was a print of a morning sun rising, just beginning to crest the horizon. They both noticed the feedback loop at the same time and began to laugh together, neither saying a word.

“She speaks the language too!”

Paul hugged her on the way out as he prepared to leave. Something subtle tugged at the corner of his awareness, like the whispered edge of a loose end.

“Wait—was this somehow about the book I’m writing or am I supposed to see about joining Horizon Trust or what?”

Dr. Q shrugged, as if there was no one right answer. 

“He didn’t really say.”

Paul may as well have levitated back to his car, gobsmacked that his longtime family eye doctor—a woman he had grown up with, a practical and professional woman his entire family had known for over three decades—was also apparently a fully clairaudient mystic. In one electrifying encounter, Paul’s exhaustion and uncertainty had transformed into a cellular sense of living, breathing adventure.

Upon arriving home that afternoon Paul cherished every second of the priceless opportunity he’d been given to play with his son, building spirals of interconnected toy train tracks together. His heart burst wide open as he witnessed the pride Luke took in his creation, a living reverberation of the archetypal bond between father and son.

Then his son went down for a nap, and he sat down to finish his book.

Paul hadn’t written anything for weeks—he’d been too busy, too tired, and too stuck. The creative muse had all but left him, every ounce of spare energy wrapped up in full on domestic stay at home Dad-ness.

But Dr. Q had jumpstarted his inner spirit. And with the pure joy of fatherhood in his heart and the undeniable magic of their meeting still permeating the very air he breathed, he could feel something in that book now waiting for him. He just knew it—not at the surface level of his mind, not in the rise and fall of his emotions, but in the deepest marrow of his bones. With his entire being, through and through.

It felt like destiny.

Eyes closed in spontaneous surrender once more, and he began scrolling through the pages and chapters he’d written—like flipping through the higher cable channels on TV aeons ago—like rippling through that Bible in church—like following the inner pull on a quest for a fellow coworker’s lost treasure. His heart area warmed, embracing every corner of the moment, and the familiar sense of infinite potential amplified even more.

Ready to write, Paul opened his eyes and blinked.

The cursor blinked back at him, hovering within a three-word phrase.

The blinking stopped, and Paul wondered if his computer might be frozen. Time stood still once more, in the space before between and after. After its very own eternity, the cursor began blinking again, and only then did Paul see where it was pointing. It was smack in the middle of a chapter heading, a chapter he’d written months ago:

“Will I ever get used to this?” Paul gasped out a laugh, knowing full well that he never would.

Words began to flow then, every keyboard stroke its own little lightning bolt of inspiration, and he watched as letters and phrases and paragraphs poured out. The book was writing itself. It occurred to Paul that he wasn’t writing anything—the whole of creation was already being written all around him. And it was unfathomably beautiful.

An image came to mind as he wrote. Clara. When the ocean of soundwaves had crystallized around them, and they saw one another for the first time. When, through the most powerful force in the universe, they were brought into the present moment, together.

Paul Endrum smiled, suddenly knowing how his book was going to end. The one that had begun with his journaled revelations about Reflex Sympathetic Dystrophy. The one he’d started writing during his unorthodox sabbatical. The one with the truth of its story unfolding in its own good time.

The one in your own eyes right now.

Coincidence Speaks is a work of creative autobiographical nonfiction. Any and all resemblance to reality is purely coincidental.