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.

The meeting wound down. My boss gathered his papers, said 'right, thanks all' — and my stomach dropped, wrong, I'd been fooling myself — and then paused, looked at the sad ficus by the window, and added, almost to himself, the exact sentence, the plants, the watering, the whole odd little coda, verbatim, as I'd written it ten minutes before he thought of it.

I've still got the notebook page. I've shown it to no one, because 'I predicted my boss's comment about the plants' is not a sentence you can say and keep your reputation. But I keep it, that page, the six hits and the plant coda, as proof to myself that for one dull Tuesday I sat in a meeting I'd somehow already attended, reading everyone's lines a beat before they said them, including the throwaway ones, including the plants nobody but a future me could have known he'd mention.