It took me back to so many memories I felt I was going to drown in them.
I remember being forced to read Hamlet in high school before we could get to Romeo and Juliet and all I could think was how boring this guy's family drama was and I just wanted to get through it. Don't get me wrong, Hamlet is a great play, but nothing is more fantastic a story than two star-crossed lovers fighting against all odds only to still lose love in their last breath. It's fucking tragic.
Almost as tragic as standing in a high school auditorium realizing I was the same age as my friend's little brother in an equally small high school in an equally small town twenty years ago. And now, all my friends have kids in high school. The surrealism is overwhelming. What the hell have I done with the last 20 years of my life?
I remember being fifteen and wanting nothing more than to be pretty and popular and have a boyfriend. Embarrassingly, I was foolish enough to actually try out for cheerleading even though I didn't stand a chance in hell. I dressed up for all the spirit days, I ran for student council (and lost), I was in the marching band, and I bought a ridiculously expensive $130 designer gown for the big winter formal dance only to be humiliated and turned down by my crush, ditched by my best friend who got the flu the night before the dance, and I showed up alone. In a designer black velvet dress that I still have packed away in a box somewhere under my bed.
I wrote love poems for guys who barely knew I existed and now those same guys are married with multiple kids, a 401K, a house, two cars, a dog and cat... and they stay in touch by "liking" the pictures of my cat on instagram.
I'm not entirely sure where I expected to be by the time I hit my mid-thirties but I certainly didn't expect this life. Which is not to say it's all bad. I have a fabulous couch, a hilarious cat, and I've almost finally completed my vintage Cinderella gooseberry Pyrex casserole dish collection.
I have pictures of me and my sister hanging just outside my kitchen from our sophomore year of high school. I'm pretty sure even back then we knew with certainty that we were never going to be cool, but I'm also pretty sure we were okay with that.
But back to Hamlet. I remember all my friends having crushes on Mel Gibson in his rendition but I was always partial to the version with Ethan Hawke and Julia Stiles. She was the perfect Ophelia and I loathed Hamlet for turning her away because they would have make the prettiest babies and had a perfect family and a perfect life. Juia was my favourite actress... and ironically, tied to a lot of Shakespeare covers that influenced my life in my teen and college years. She was in the retelling of Taming of the Shrew via 10 things I Hate About You which gave poetry writing girls like a chance to finally kiss the dreamy curly haired bad boy who serenaded her on the football field. Then she was on O, the retelling of Othello. And later in college, she was in that princess movie where she falls in love with the prince of denmark who poses as a foreign exchange student. And of course it's Denmark because it comes full circle back to who she could'be been in Hamlet.
I suppose though, just like with Romeo and Juliet, I'll never stop holding my breathe hoping if I read it enough times she might actually wake up before Romeo drinks the poison and they could run away together and still be happy.
I'm always chasing the rainbow at the end of that silly Utopian dream of a happy ending. Which is probably why I'm in my mid-thirties living alone with a cat and still writing poems. Perhaps it's just an unchangeable constant in my life that was set forth by the universe before I was ever born and in every conceivable alternate plane of existence, there is always a version of me living alone writing poems.. but with varying numbers of cats.
After the play we grabbed some burgers to go from what's apparently the only bar in the hole-in-the-wall city where my friend lives. The food is always good and the people remind me of home in a way that's almost painful. Listening to those drunk guys getting on stage singing Alabama and Alan Jackson on karaoke night reminded me of the dive bars my friends my theatre friends and I used to sing at in college. My roommate and I performed in The Tempest together my sophomore year. It was one of the last plays I did before graduation. Theater led me to a career in radio and radio led me here. And it seems, "here" led me back to Shakespeare.
Given that the play last night was written like a Dr. Seuss story, my friend asked me how accurate it was in relation to everyone dying and I explained that it was a classic Shakespearean tragedy. Sometimes life doesn't feel too far off. I mean, at best, more than a third of my life is over, at worst, I could be already halfway to my grave. I wonder sometimes if I'm destined to live the rest of my life in solitude, replacing cat after cat as they age, and when I finally expire myself, the neighbours will poke through my belongings at an awkward estate sale full of old paintings and dozens upon dozens of notebooks filled with hopeless romantic love poems and photo albums of awkward teenage girls from the 90s. Being a writer was never my choice. It was something that crawled into the center of my soul, took root, and consumed me whole. Along with this silly girly notion to fall madly in love like Ophelia, but not be crushed by the weight of my own heart beneath the surface of a nearby lake.
So much of Shakespeare's writing is wrapped up in tales of love. I have to wonder if maybe he had a cat too. And which side of the lake he was on when he left this world...
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