Everyone in the Meeting Was Reading From My Memory

It was the dullest possible venue for the uncanny: a Tuesday project meeting, eight of us round a table, an agenda nobody had read. And about four minutes in, the familiarity landed on me — not new-meeting familiarity, but the settled weight of a thing already lived. I had sat through this exact meeting. I knew its shape.

Most déjà vu you can't test; it's gone before you can catch it. This one lasted, and gave me the chance to do science. Quietly, in my notebook, as the meeting unspooled, I started writing down what came next before it came. 'Deng interrupts about the budget.' Deng interrupted about the budget. 'Priyanka knocks her coffee.' Priyanka, reaching for a pen, knocked her coffee, a small brown disaster, apologies all round. 'Boss says we'll circle back, we don't circle back.' My boss said we'll circle back; we did not.

Six predictions, written a sentence ahead, six hits, in a meeting I could not have scripted — I hadn't set the agenda, didn't know Priyanka would sit where she sat or reach when she reached. I was reading the room like a book I'd read before, the pages arriving under my pen a moment before they turned in the world.

For the finale, because by now my heart was going and I needed to know if I was really seeing ahead or just pattern-matching a dull meeting, I wrote down, with ten minutes still to run, the last thing my boss would say before he closed the meeting. A specific, slightly odd sign-off — not his usual 'right, thanks all,' but a particular sentence about a particular unrelated thing, a comment about the office plants needing watering while we were all in the room, of all things. I wrote it, closed my notebook, and waited.