star-crossed lovers

A mirror, this play was. My university was holding the first showing of Romeo and Juliet, but they’d re-created the story into a half modern tale. One of those renditions where they make part of it relatable to our time while keeping the same Shakespearian dialect. I’d been told this and that about the quality of the play, and I had been in the know of some backstage drama that’d floated around in my circle of theater production comrades. Yet, my curiosity outweighed me. (You know, I’ve been very self centered lately, how I bring the spotlight towards myself in a conversation. Is that why I like writing about myself so much? Is the word self-centered or egotistical or, whatever the label. Why do I act so bold, so loud?…) 

Hearing the story again was surreal for two reasons: the first cause for my immediate enrapture into that nostalgic dialogue was, I assume like many children, I had grown up with several iterations of Shakespeare’s play. One of them was that strange 1996 live action with Leonardo DiCaprio, I wonder if anyone else has seen it, the one where everyone is in Las Vegas or some other warm city and while everything else is GTA coded their speech mimics that of the origin. I’m unsure if having this as a childhood favorite film affected my psyche in the developmental stages of my life. There was another adaptation with seals which I had memorized a great amount of and would recite verbatim outside of class. My eyes have grown too much to see this movie in the same manner, but my heart knows it all the same (my writing gets worse when I’m happy. I woke up somewhat content today. Odd.) 

The second large thought that hit me was what I was watching. A mirror. Romeo, the pitted soul that clung itself onto the fair Juliet, a soul magnet, the strongest desire for one love. Who died at the loss of the one love. This tune sounded so familiar, triggering a Pavlov’s dog of a reaction that I almost started to cry again. But I am only a millionth grain of sand in the other depressed sand grains around me. When you are only living one life you only feel one life, and thus you feel isolated because your entire senses are surrounded into one body. It’s only when you understand another body that you feel less alone. Stupid simple, stupid, you would know that it’s not some revelation. I never considered myself a romantic until I found that same mind swooning over the verbiage of Romeo and Juliet I had long forgotten. 

“Yon light is not day-light, I know it, I

It is some meteor that the sun exhales,

To be to thee this night a torch-bearer,

And light thee on thy way to Mantua:

Therefore stay yet; thou need'st not to be gone.”

Denying the sun is a wish I have cast time and time again, but have now cast it on the presence of another. I damn the sun when I know the bed will be cold again. When the next day arrives and I awake to the emptiness that’s followed me.