Coincidences and Non Coincidences

I'm a big believer in the notion that everything happens for a reason and that things in the universe have a way of finding the people they are meant to find. Almost 4 years ago now I lost my grandmother, and I still find it really difficult and really painful to be without her. I find myself regretting things. Things I should have said, things I should have done more of, and things I should have held on to. When I was little my grandma started giving away a lot of her things, but a lot of the things she gave me were things that I was too young to really appreciate or hold on to.

I do have some pieces of really beautiful jewelry, but little things like an old jewelry box or her perfume bottles, kind of just got lost over time and that is something that just really really eats away at me. I could kick my 12 year old self for not taking better care of things and not realizing that down the road these seemingly unimportant things would mean so much to me.

But every once in a weird while something will happen. Every once in a while I'll stumble across something that I lost or just vividly remember from my grandma's home when I was a child.  And I don't mean happen across in my home. I mean like I do not have this particular item at all and I will be in an antique store and then suddenly, there among the jewelry is a bracelet my grandmother had. Or tonight, while casually scrolling through pages on Etsy, I happen across the exact perfume bottle I lost/probably threw out years ago.

Honestly, is this something that happens to people? Do you find yourself stumbling across items from your past out in the world? I find that we can be so strangely linked to certain things in our lives. Things that just hold such powerful memories for us, and I don't know why that is. Why we hold on to the things we hold on to.

I can't tell you how often I have thought about this little bottle. Isn't that silly? Of all things. It's a pretty perfume bottle, but why do I remember it so clearly and think about it so often, and beat myself up about having lost it! And yet, here it is. Suddenly and unexpectedly it has come back to me. I don't believe anything is ever truly gone from this world. And I don't think it's fair to write things like this off as a coincidence. Life is just far too complicated for something like this to be without meaning.