So there’s this piece on Slate about a writer who lost her computer in a cab, and after a bout of self-loathing, she bought a new computer. This was a story because a year after she got a new computer, she checked her Facebook Other Messages and learned that someone had found her computer soon after she lost it and wanted to return it.

And what are Facebook Other Messages? Something no one checks right below Facebook Messages.

Obviously, the only thing to do after reading that article was to check my own Facebook Other Messages. And wouldn’t you know it, but I also had an alternate reality hidden for me there.

A woman whose house I looked at in September, and whose spare bedroom I was interested in, sent me a message on Facebook to invite me to move in. Because we weren’t Facebook friends, her message got hidden in the Other section. We never became roommates, and we will probably never become Facebook friends either.

While I would have moved in there—it was a furnished room, which appealed to me at the time—I ended up in my own place, an attic apartment with good light and tons of wood paneling. My apartment is probably the best thing in my life right now. Or at least it’s the thing I think about when my yoga class goes in the “take a moment to be thankful for something” direction.

In a quote brought to my attention by a recent episode of Gossip Girl, Albert Camus once said, “Life is a sum of all your choices.” It’s also the sum of all the things you didn’t get to choose. Still, it’s rare to see the mechanics of fate, and in this case, I was lucky not be given a voice.