By 
For months I kept noticing the same silver Corolla that always seemed to end up next to my little pink Vitz in the Garden City parking lot. Morning after morning, evening after evening, we somehow chose neighbouring slots.
Sometimes love doesn’t arrive with roses -it parks quietly beside you.
At first, I thought it was just a coincidence. Then it became routine, almost comforting.Kampala’s traffic is wild; parking is a sport. Yet somehow, in all that chaos, there was this small moment of predictability- our two cars side by side. I never saw the driver clearly, only caught glimpses- a neat shirt sleeve, a coffee cup, the way his headlights flicked twice before he drove off. I told myself it was nothing, but each day, when I found his car already there, I smiled inside.
Then one Friday evening, after an especially long week, I came back to find a small scratch on my rear bumper. My heart sank, and then I noticed a neatly folded note tucked under my wiper.“I’m terribly sorry. I misjudged the turn. Please call me - Jake.” People in Kampala rarely leave notes after scratches. They disappear faster than traffic lights change. So I called, half expecting a fake number. To my surprise, he picked up immediately, apologised again, and offered to come over. Fifteen minutes later, there he was- tall, soft-spoken, carrying a small bottle of polish and an honest smile.We ended up talking as he carefully buffed the mark off himself. He made jokes about his terrible reversing, about how Garden City’s parking lines are a trap. His laugh was easy, genuine. By the time the scratch had faded, the awkwardness had too.After that day, the coincidences kept happening. Sometimes he’d arrive first and deliberately leave a space for me.
Sometimes I’d wait a few minutes just to see if his Corolla would show up. We started bringing each other small things- he’d hand me a takeaway coffee; I’d share mandazi. It wasn’t planned; it just happened naturally.One rainy afternoon, I was sitting in my car waiting for the storm to pass when I heard a knock on my window. It was him, holding an umbrella and grinning like he’d been waiting for that moment all week. We stood under it, watching rain bounce off the bonnets, laughing about how Kampala drivers suddenly forget what wipers are for. “I guess the universe really wanted us to park beside each other,” he said.“Or maybe Garden City’s parking is just cursed,” I teased.Either way, it became our thing- that parking spot, those brief conversations that stretched longer each time.A few months later, he told me he was being transferred to Mbarara. I tried to be happy for him, but something inside me tightened.
On his last day, I found another note under my wiper. “Thank you for turning a parking space into a meeting space- J.”I kept that note in my glove compartment. For weeks, the space beside me stayed empty. Then one afternoon, as I reversed into the lot, I noticed a familiar silver Corolla again. Different number plate, same neat parking. On the dashboard, a small sticker read: “Keep parking close.”He was back- and this time, he said, for good.It’s funny how a simple parking scratch turned into a story I’ll never forget. In a city where everyone seems to be in a rush, we somehow paused long enough to find each other.Sometimes the road to connection isn’t a highway. It’s a parking lot, a tiny scratch, and a cup of coffee shared between two strangers who just happened to park side by side.So I ask you- have you ever met someone special because of a car accident, or maybe, just a parking mistake?
