(Setting the stage for M is for Manifestations)

It started as a party.

Not even a special one — just another crowded room filled with the familiar chatter of colleagues, old schoolmates, and mutual friends bound together by overlapping social circles and slightly too loud playlists.

She wasn’t supposed to go.

Neither was he.

And yet, there they were — standing within arm’s reach of each other near the drinks table, commenting on the same overly sweet punch and laughing a little too long.

They had known of each other a good couple of decades earlier. Back then, they were both deeply attached — settled into relationships that had felt like endpoints. Their paths crossed now and then: an event, a shared table, a community space. Any interaction between them had been minimal — polite, platonic, and, if anything, quietly agape; a warm respect. Nothing more. Nothing imagined.

So when they saw each other again — years later, older, unguarded, and unexpectedly open — it startled them both. It startled them not because they had not changed but because something had.

 

A glance held for a second too long. A pause. A throwaway comment that turned into a conversation. It felt less like a meeting and more like recognition.

For the next few days, they were inseparable. Walks. Voice notes. Long drives to nowhere. A weird, tender urgency — as though they were cramming years of unspoken connection into the tight folds of borrowed time.

And yet… nothing happened. Not in the traditional sense. No affair. No declarations. No lines crossed.

Just presence. Presence charged and confusing and inexplicably soft.

 

What lingered was the feeling — the sense that they were sitting in a space between lives. One foot in reality, the other in a version of the universe that had maybe, just maybe, orchestrated this strange reunion. Everything around them felt liminal — suspended, delicate, full of potential and impossibility.

Later, they would both admit it: they had been silently asking the universe for something. They had been asking, not necessarily for each other, but for a shift. A shake-up. A sign – a sign that they were still capable of feeling something unexpected. Something that indicated that love and hope were still worth holding on to.

 

They did not make a decision that week. How could they?

However, the air around them buzzed with that sacred kind of tension — like something was waiting to unfold. If not now, then soon.

 

Self-Reflection

Some moments do not fit into a tidy category. They are not beginnings or endings — they just are.

They stretch across the space between ‘what was’ and ‘what could be.’

That’s the liminal.

Moments like these remind us how easily life can shift in the twinkle of an eye — how the universe is always listening, and fate is always watching, playing a quiet chess game.  Moments like these remind us that while sometimes we win and sometimes we lose, every so often, something truly extraordinary happens: a moment so magical, so out of the ordinary, it becomes a personal landmark.

A hinge.

A whisper of destiny.

It becomes a memory etched so deeply into your story that it may be un-sharable — not because it lacks meaning, but because no words could ever fully contain that memory. Some moments are so powerful, so personal, they are carried not in conversation but in silence. They are carried to the grave sometimes, and even if not taken to the grave, the gravity of the moment can only ever be explained only by both people who lived it. It becomes sacred — a shared knowing that lives between them and nowhere else. In many cases, that moment does not just shake the present — it quietly rewrites the future. It births a brand-new path.

Have you ever had one?

What did that moment teach you about your desires? About your truth?

Next week, we explore what happens when the universe listens. When a quiet yearning becomes a manifestation. When the liminal becomes real.

‘M is for Manifestation’ is coming up next.

Until then, ‘see’ you next week.

Sally Chiwuzie
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IG Handle: @unshakable.is.a.state.of.mind