What my brother would call a life lesson.

It’s a mistake people make when out with a friend, that in a busy city atmosphere no one is listening to your conversation. The belief stems, I think, from the false supposition that everybody around you is too busy living their own life — either talking to someone else or lost deep in their own thoughts — to take notice of what you and your interlocutor are saying to each other. Well. Pay attention next time, and you will see that there is always that one person who tries a little too hard to appear uninterested. In a restaurant they sit alone at the table next to you, pretending to type at their laptop. On the subway they are seated opposite you, staring with feigned fascination at the advertisements above your head. On the metro they are staring a bit too intently at the news feed on their phone they are not scrolling through.  (How do I recognize those people? Because I have been that person and done those very things. Many times. How else would I find my inspiration?) Meanwhile, you are talking with your friend, thinking: these people around me, they have their own problems, they have no interest in mine. So you freely discuss the gossip from the office, the latest pair of friends to be divorcing, your anxiety as you await results from your skin biopsy. It occurs to you, in the most fleeting of ways, that somebody may in fact be eavesdropping on your conversation. But you shrug your shoulders, because it is so nice to be talking with a friend, and who cares who is listening. Do they give a shit about your unevenly contoured mole? Of course they don’t. (In fact, you could go further and ask yourself how much your friend really cares to hear about your mole…though that is topic for another time.) But you are right: the stranger definitely doesn’t care! Except — except! — when the supposed rarest of coincidences occurs, and the person you are gossiping about, who normally exists in a universe completely separate from where you are now, happens to be standing nearby. Which, of course, is the other mistake people make: the supposition that in a big, crowded city, the chances of running into someone you know are slim. I will tell you, if this were actually true, it would happen once in a blue moon. And yet — though I don’t know technically how often a blue moon does come along — it seems to happen a lot more often than that.

You have probably guessed why I am giving you this valuable advice. You have correctly inferred that I am speaking from a place of experience, though not in the way you are imagining. Because last night, you see, as I rode the crowded subway back to my hotel, I found myself standing a mere meter and a half away from a woman I’d recently met, as she recounted to her friend — oblivious to the possibility that I could be standing nearby —  the evening she and I had spent together the week before. You say it could have been another man she was speaking of? I think you know, based on what has been happening to me lately, that there are certain unique hallmarks to the encounters I have been having; and though I would never presume to be the only one to bring out the eccentricities in a woman, in this particular case I know it was me she was talking about. And frankly, I’m not sure what to think.

Jean-Pierre Robillard New York, NY