Take a trip back with me to 9th grade English. I know right, nobody wants to go there. I remember being assigned an essay where I had to cite examples of foreshadowing in Romeo and Juliet. I remember because I didn’t do the essay. The teacher pulled me aside a week after the essay was due and asked why I didn’t hand it in. I said I just didn’t do it.
Ask a simple question, get a simple answer.
She said I could have done it and just handed it in late. I said I thought it had already been too late.
Unbeknownst to me, I would go on to experience a real life Romeo and Juliet story myself over 20 years later.
At 14 years old, I had foreshadowed myself.
Image by Alana Jordan on Pixabay
Ever have something happen in your life and look back days, months, even years later and go damn, I actually saw that coming?
Yeah, I’ve epically had that happen.
Peter Benchley only wishes he could have been so foreshadowy. Just kidding, he did a killer job. Haha I realize what I just wrote there.
Who the hell is Peter Benchley you say? He wrote Jaws. Spielberg made the movie, Benchley wrote the book. I know, I didn’t remember that either. Thank God for GTS*.
Where is the foreshadowing in Jaws besides the obvious that this shark is gonna fuck some people up?
Well, there is a clever little nugget very early in the movie that portends the ending. I’ll let you think about it. **Spoiler alert below. I love trivia.
I love the movie Jaws, watched it probably 812 times in my life, now 813 as of last night. But this 813th time was the first time I noticed this bit of foreshadowing.
Try everything twice I say, or 813 times. You never know what you may have missed.
Here’s some real life foreshadowing you won’t believe is actually true:
In 1999 I moved in with my then boyfriend to his house. It was a dump. We moved out together to another place after about six months. And six months after that we split up.
Fast forward to 2005 and a subsequent boyfriend I had met at work lived at the same address as my first boyfriend. Weird. Again, moved in with him for a few months to save money then we moved out. The place was still a dump.
Fast fast forward through a marriage and a divorce to the year 2014 and I started dating another guy who, you guessed it, lived at the exact same address. This time it was remodeled and nice. No more dump.
What are the fucking odds–three different boyfriends, one same address.
So you’re guessing me and this boyfriend moved in there together right?
Wrong.
We didn’t move into the notorious address due to a situation my 14-year-old-Romeo-and-Juliet-essay-writing-self would have never believed.
I moved in alone this time, because my Romeo boyfriend died by suicide. And no, he didn’t die in the house! But I did take over the lease and moved in about two months after he died. It just felt right. Hell, I had lived here two times before anyway.
Should Have Seen This One Coming:
I remember what happened on just the second night we had started seeing each other.
Sitting in his living room he started talking about how he had taken up shooting as a hobby and often went to the local shooting range on his days off. He was starting to amass a formidable gun collection and proudly showed me a handgun he had in his coffee table, one of those tables where the top lifts up to reveal a small storage compartment. I remember him saying “go ahead hold it.”
I remember not liking that. Guns make me nervous.
Photo by Bernd Dittrick on Unsplash
Three years later he was gone.
Signs Signs Everywhere
Was the revelation of his foreboding hobby a sign of how things were going to ultimately end? Sure, now that I look back.
Maybe me being nervous about it was a sign too. Maybe I was supposed to do something with these signs and didn’t.
Maybe they were just a coincidence.
Maybe it all doesn’t matter either way now.
I remember another time that I was really nervous:
A few years ago me and a friend went hiking one day on this trail with some pretty harrowing large rocks and boulders. Well, you guessed it, he slipped. Down he went straight on his back. In the maybe 20 seconds he was laying on his back and looking up at me I instantly had 10,000 thoughts–“oh my god he broke his neck, he’s paralyzed, I can’t carry him, how are we going to get out of here, how would the ambulance get here, how would rescuers get him out, what hospital are we going to go to, how is he going to survive without being able to work…”
Then just a few moments later he got up and we walked out. Close call.
Screeeeeeeech! Then a year later he was in a car accident and actually did break his neck. Direct hit.
He’s okay now, thank God. If you call permanent nerve damage vs. being paralyzed okay.
Slipping on that boulder he didn’t even know he was the main character in his own personal foreshadowing essay. Oh how art imitates life.
My friend at Ringing Rocks Park, pre-broken neck
I did eventually hand in that essay in 9th grade. I get my homework done on time now, homework from my therapist that is. Okay, sometimes I’m still a little late, but I do do it. Procrastination alive and strong.
And I still live at this same infamous address. I’m gonna say I’m meant to live here at this point. This now non-dump is actually a steal considering the amount of space I have in one of the more expensive areas of the country, the Northeast. Just call me Monica from Friends. How in the fuck did she afford a place like that in NYC?
Oh yeah, rent control. I don’t have that, but I got in when the gettin was good. Lucky some would say.
Fate I would say.
Fate that started all the way back in 1999. Or maybe even 9th grade.
Foreshadowing, fate, coincidence, luck, good or bad, maybe all you can do is look back and say to the Universe “ha, I see what you did there” and be thankful for the roof over your head and friends who pick you up when you fall.
Keep going and growing.
Maybe that 9th grade essay was also another sign of foreshadowing: it’s never too late.
❤️
CM
*GTS – Google That Shit
**Spoiler Alert – About 20 minutes into the movie the main character, Chief Brody, is reading a book about sharks. In it is a picture of a shark with a scuba tank in it’s mouth. (If you don’t remember the ending of Jaws, I can’t help you. If you’ve never even seen Jaws, I really can’t help you.)
8/30/24
