Right place. Or how Carol from CVS is basically my fairy godmother

Whenever I hear someone say that wherever we are is exactly where we’re meant to be, and that there’s some reason we’re here right now, and that at every point in time, we’re always in our right place, I can’t not roll my eyes. But, like, on the inside, because manners.

Even though on some level I completely believe it’s true. Right place is just a little hard to digest when you’re standing in line at Grocery Outlet. Fluorescent lighting and philosophy aren’t exactly bedfellows.

I had a bad case of right place skepticism a while back. Thanks to a burning California, the only seat in the front yard that wasn’t covered in ash was a swinging bench nobody ever sits in, as it’s completely overtaken by a persimmon tree.

I’m a pretty small person. Like, I can wear heels on a blind date, small. But as I maneuvered into the chair and adjusted myself vertically, I only made eye contact with branches.

Breathing smoke from the burning sky, sitting cross-legged in the early morning on a rickety sun-worn patio swing with my head inside a persimmon tree, my brain wandered off to consider right place. The concept that this was my right place was so bizarre it was laughable.

Which means it probably was exactly where I needed to be. Because that’s usually how it works.

***

I ate shit on my skateboard the other day and rolled right over to CVS to stock up on bandaids and hydrogen peroxide. The shelf for hydrogen peroxide was completely empty.

I went up to the register to check out, and asked in a last ditch attempt if they had any hydrogen peroxide in the back or anything. The cashier reaches to the side without so much as shifting her body, and pulls a bottle of hydrogen peroxide out of nowhere. It was the closest to magic I’ve been in a minute.

She also signed me up for a rewards card to get $10 off my purchase. So Carol from CVS is basically my fairy godmother.

Why is it that right place so often feels like a bad SNL sketch, and other times you can mother fucking manifest hydrogen peroxide out of thin air?

***

A few months back I wrote an article for work about the importance of sleep hygiene. The irony of how much sleep I lost over that story did not escape me.

Much in the same way that neck-deep writing this piece about right place, I found myself pacing the driveway ranting to my mom about a car I was trying to buy that sold out from underneath me.

I was so mad that I kept accidentally hanging up by hitting the phone with my face. I’ve never face hungup on someone before. And I’m not proud of how many mad face hangups there were.

What I was most mad about was that this car felt right. I’d been looking for what felt like an eternity and trying with everything I had to keep an abundance mindset. It was that kind of trying where you tense everything so tightly you can practically feel veins bulging. Probably not quite what abundance calls for, but sometimes being human is hard.

This car felt like the answer. My answer. I’d been moving along in as close to a state of abundance as I could muster, and I was sure this was the universe’s provision. Right on time, thank you very much.

If what’s for you won’t go by you, I was sure this one was for me. And to see it go by me felt like a bitch slap from divinity.

In between face hangups, my mom tried to talk me down from the ledge. She said that maybe there was someone who needed the car more than me.

I said I was sure there wasn’t. I needed this car more than anyone else in the world.

Maybe the car was a lemon, my mom suggested, and it was actually for the better that I didn’t get it.

I insisted she was wrong. This was the most perfect car in the world, and now it was gone and I’ll never find another and the universe had clearly screwed up big time on this one.

A few weeks later I found out it was a shady dealership, and that the car I’d been so quick to deem as my own was likely a scam.

***

“So what if you’re like fucked up shooting heroin at the bottom of a ditch somewhere?” I asked my friend Kelsey. “There’s no way that’s your right place.”

Kelsey’s an adamant right placer, and I was determined to prove him wrong.

Coincidentally he’d called just as I’d stepped into the back of a long Covid testing line. I was still holding my phone from the obligatory grandma call I’d made when I saw the length of the line, but she hadn’t picked up. Probably because her granddaughter’s an asshole who only calls her while waiting in line.

Kelsey argued that fucked up in a creekbed is no exception to right place. Because, consciously or not, we choose the lessons we need to learn in life. The decisions we made in the past led to our current reality, and what we do with the now dictates the next reality we’ll come to a few minutes down the line.

So that ditch holds something for us. It’s the cumulation of all our pre-ditch decisions. And the choices we make in that creekbed will pave the way for our post-ditch self.

Kelsey finished the conversation and hung up right as I reached the front of the line. His timing couldn’t have been more disgustingly perfect. I didn’t tell him because I knew how smug it’d make him.

I’ve spent a lot of time rejecting right place. Because I was so sure that my own right place was somewhere much much cooler than my current reality.

But I agreed with the concept of choosing the lessons we need to learn in life, and those lessons coming at us again and again until we learn them and level up. Then we get new lessons. I just hadn’t tried fitting right place into that conversation before.

Right place had felt almost synonymous to predestination, and as the one standing in aisle seven, I was pissed. Because that fucker over there got Greek mountaintop, meanwhile I’m surrounded by jumbo tampons.

Right place made more sense when it became just another way of saying that there is no wrong place. Because it’s just a reflection of the choices we made. How we reacted. What we prioritized.

Consciously or not, micro-decision by micro-decision, we’re continually choosing our own realities.

***

Probably not top on the list of things I’m supposed to brag to my life coach about, is flipping someone off.

But this guy was being a total creep out the car window as I cycled past.

When retelling the story, I left out the part about my bike having a flat tire, feeling it somehow detract from the overall badassery of the situation.

My life coach and I celebrated. Because it was the bird I’d always wanted to throw to all the fuckers who thought it was ok to say things out of car windows, or across streets, or at buffet tables when their wives were on the other side of the room.

But instead I’d ignored them, or smiled politely. Because I’m the kind of honker who waits three seconds before responding as I debate whether honking at the car who just cut me off would be rude.

I felt no remorse upon giving him the finger. My mother would be horrified.

And as I cycled away to the sound of my tires thud-flop, thud-flopping beneath me, I figured that just maybe I could get used to this whole right place thing after all.

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