Alice In Wonderland

San José, Costa Rica

Once upon time I was a heartbroken 22-year-old and ran out of town with my dog to drive around the country meeting young punk rockers with couches. During that adventure I encountered some truly eye-popping coincidences - like meeting a man who was wearing my dog's long lost dog tag that had my phone number etched into it.

I wrote about those coincidences in a zine and later had a friend tattoo the number 19 on my ankle. The number 19 for me was a symbol of all coincidences, which meant fate - or powerlessness - and reminded me that so much of existence is out of my control and/or beyond my understanding.

*

This time around the coincidence was Alice in Wonderland. I was seeing Alice in Wonderland everywhere.

Somewhere in Mexico I had picked up a copy of Alicia en el Pais de Las Maravillas. I'd never read it and I wanted a book written in Spanish for practice.

When I made it to Guatemala I started reading Swamplandia, which begins with a quote from Through the Looking Glass.

Then Emily convinced me to start watching Westlandia, which has this central recurring scene in which one of the main characters reads Alice in Wonderland to his dying child. This struck a particular cord with me, as I remember my sister reading the Lewis Caroll books to my baby brother when we were kids and he was in a coma.

After Alicia en el Pais de Las Maravillas I found a used copy of A Través del Espejo y lo que Alicia Encontró Allí.

And after Swamplandia I started reading On Beauty, in which I found a quote from Alice in Wonderland.

In Nicaragua I matched on Tinder with a woman who had an Alice in Wonderland profile picture.

Then in Costa Rica Dyan recommended a tattoo artist to me and chose as a sample of his work a Cheshire cat tattoo.

Later in my travels I would go on a treasure hunt where the solution was a reference to Alice going down the rabbit hole. But that's getting a little ahead of myself.

So none of these rank super high among the coincidences I have encountered in my life, but it's fair to say that I had begun to feel like I saw Alice everywhere and it felt creepy.

*

During the days of 19, the coincidences I ran into became incredibly meaningful to me and helped me through a really tough time. I developed a mantra something along the lines of the AA creed about only worrying about the things in your control and accepting powerlessness over the rest.

Sadly for this blog I have to date drawn no conclusions about the appearance of Alice of Wonderland in my life. Could just be that she has become cliché and everyone creating a fictional world likes to reference her. Or maybe a higher power is exposing me to images of Wonderland in an effort to remind me of my own powerlessness for the sake of pacifying my eternal soul. Probly not that one.

Perhaps you the reader of this blog can help me. If you have a theory as to why I'm seeing Alice everywhere please add a comment below. In the meantime I will ask Pan the troll and see what he thinks.