I have this friend; her name's Becky. We've known each other for almost two decades now, but we didn't become Actual Friends right away. She was one of those people who just kept crossing my path until we realized we were destined to be in each other's lives.
We went to the same school in The Middle of Nowhere, Saskatchewan but ran in different circles. She moved to Saskatoon after that and just so happened to live in a house with a close friend of mine. I'd stay in that house when I visited that friend, but didn't really interact with Becky at all when I was there (although! Once I played a Modest Mouse album on my friend's laptop and Becky got into them because of that, so that counts as the very first of many music recommendations to pass between the two of us. Years later, I would go for coffee with her for the first time and we'd talk about music and she'd say she liked Modest Mouse and I'd get so excited to have something in common with her and she'd tell me that it was me who'd introduced her to them in the first place).
When I moved to Regina and started dating my now-husband, he mentioned one day that he'd said my name at work and one of his coworkers had been like, "Huh, I wonder if that's the same Suzy I sort of know." I said, What's the girl's name? And he said, Becky. And I said, Of course it is.
We became real friends after that. I don't think we really had a choice, which is a good thing.
She moved away a few years ago, but we stay in touch, texting and visiting and sending snail mail. And here's the weird thing: on some other inexplicable level, our brains have stayed in touch even without our technological aid.
The first time I really noticed this, I was sitting at my desk working on a book and a song popped into my head that I hadn't heard or thought of in years—probably since I was a teenager. I texted Becky:
Remember this song from, like, 1998? It randomly popped into my head this morning.
Her reply:
SUZY. That song just as randomly came to me today; I've had it on repeat over here!
This keeps happening, and it never gets less weird—if anything it's stranger each time because the probability goes down. Chances of something like that happening once? Slim but not nonexistent. Chances of it happening over and over...?
So weird.
And it extends beyond music. She'll become interested in a very specific topic and text me about it, only to find I've been reading articles about that thing and listening to podcasts about it already. A person from some leg of our shared history will come to both of our minds, unbidden, at the same time. I'll think of her and my phone will light up with her name on the screen. It's like some part of our brains, at some point, got synced up.
One day, a year or so after the first notable instance of our invisible communications, I was listening to a podcast (and I so wish I could remember the name of it so I could share it with you) on which a physicist was explaining the concept of quantum entanglement. He was talking about how scientists had figured out how to entangle two particles so that they behave as one object. They could put one particle on a spaceship and send it into outer space, and still the objects would not become unlinked. The podcast explained that this was a process that happened naturally as well, but it wasn't very well understood yet how.
As described by Space.com:
"Quantum entanglement is a bizarre, counterintuitive phenomenon that explains how two subatomic particles can be intimately linked to each other even if separated by billions of light-years of space. Despite their vast separation, a change induced in one will affect the other."
Or, as Einstein famously put it:
"Spooky action at a distance."
I found this concept fascinating. It feels, at first, a little magical and abstract, but I think the thing I love most about it is that it's just...science. It's testable and provable and it points to the fact that there is so much more going on around us (and within us?) than is physically or easily observable.
So. Am I saying that Becky and I are entangled on a quantum level, and that's why we always get the same super-random songs stuck in our heads, or get obsessed with the same topics at the same time without each other's knowledge, or any other number of strange coincidental things? I don't know. I've done a lot of reading about it, and there seems to be some debate about whether it's possible for people to become entangled with each other, but there also seems to be some proof of it. And when I was writing I Think We've Been Here Before, I decided that in the world in which I was setting this scenario and these characters? Yes. It's possible. And this is the cool thing about writing fiction: you get to learn as much as you possibly can about the way the world actually works, you get to marvel at it, sit in awe of it...and then, once you feel like you have a grasp on the rules, you get to break or bend or stretch whichever ones you want to suit your purposes. You get to fill in the blanks where scientists have said, "We don't know about this!"
It's very fun.
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