“Two ships passing in the night” is a metaphor for two people who briefly cross paths before continuing on their separate journeys. They may only know each other for a moment, sometimes never see each other again, and yet something meaningful can pass between them.

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I’ve had a number of encounters like this throughout my life, although I haven’t had one in a long time. They always seemed to happen at some kind of crossroads, when I was trying to make a decision or consider a different direction, when I needed to feel seen or supported in something I was going through, or when I needed someone to offer a perspective I couldn’t find on my own.

There is something strange about being seen by a stranger. Sometimes someone who knows nothing about you can see you more clearly than the people who have known you for years. They aren’t carrying the baggage of your history or the accumulated stories of who they think you are. They encounter you only as you are in that particular moment. And because the encounter exists entirely in the present, it can somehow reach beneath all of that history to something more essential.

I’ve always thought of the people who have wandered unexpectedly into my life this way: as angels, or messengers who don’t know they are messengers. They appear, seemingly by chance, at exactly the right moment. They guide me, support me, challenge me, change something in me, and then disappear almost as quickly as they arrived.

What fascinates me is that these fleeting encounters have sometimes been more meaningful and transformative than relationships with people who remained in my life. There is a particular potency to a brief point of connection between two people who may never meet again. Something about its impermanence makes it feel more real.

This is a pattern I keep returning to in my own writing, as well as in the stories I’m most drawn to: two people briefly crossing paths, each carrying their own invisible world, and something passing between them that neither could have anticipated. These moments elevate the mundane. They make ordinary life feel more meaningful…magical. They make life feel fated, designed, or scripted, as though beneath the apparent randomness of our lives there might be some greater intentions at work.

I want to think more deeply about these encounters—the strangers who arrive at the crossroads, the brief connections that alter the course of something, and the mysterious feeling that sometimes the people who pass through our lives for only a moment can leave the deepest traces and trigger the deepest voids.

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