I went to Japan in 1992, and was staying in a Japanese friend’s house. The day I got there, she told me there was an English-language channel on the TV I was welcome to watch, and turned it on. There staring back at me from the screen was one of my old friends from school in England, who I hadn’t seen for six years. He was reading the news.
The effect on me, like the OP, was astounding. I had to sit down, then I wanted to tell everyone I met (who, of course, couldn’t give much of a shit).
Turns out he was an anchor for a Hong Kong news channel, and when I randomly ended up living in Hong Kong a few months later, I called the TV station and he and I reconnected and became buddies again for a few years.
I was in Los Angeles, at the bank, filling out a form, and a guy said my name. I looked and saw a guy that was a student in my Freshman English class in Illinois about 10 years earlier. I said oh golly I hope you got an A. He laughed and said yes he did. Would not be good to have the guy processing your loan to be someone you flunked!
I had a close friendship with a woman in college. A few years later I rounded a corner at the Penn State Arts festival and literally bumped into her. A few years after that I went back to college (a different one about 60 miles from the first) and literally bumped into her.
Many years passed and she took the initiative and hunted me down and we dated a while. It didn’t work out, but it was nice for a while.
I went to school in New Orleans in 1989. At the end of that year, I transferred out to a different school. A year or so later, a friend I’d had there moved to Chicago.
In 2004 I myself moved to Chicago and I ran into him on the train. The weird thing was that a number of unusual events had to happen for me to be on that train at that time. I left work late. I took the Red Line instead of the bus (which I never did). I stopped to have a smoke before I went up to the station (and debated with myself whether I wanted to do that, so a train I could have caught had I not stopped for a smoke came and went). And most importantly, at the stop before my stop, a seat opened up and I decided to take it (for one stop? I must have been tired that day), and it was one facing in the opposite direction I’d been standing. I turned around to take the seat, looked up, and there was Mark getting ready to get off at that stop. He’d been standing behind me the whole time.