What If Life “Rhymes”

People say history rhymes. I never thought much about it. Until I started noticing the same thing happening inside one ordinary life.

Mine. Mostly.

Because that’s the only one I get to watch from the inside.

Let me tell you what I mean. The same situation keeps coming back. Not the same costume. The costume changes every time. Different city. Different person across the table. Different stakes. A different decade even. But underneath there’s a shape I’ve met before, and the second I recognise it I get this small jolt, like hearing the back half of a couplet and knowing the sound was coming before the word arrived.

The recurrence felt like failure, like I hadn’t learned the lesson and so the universe kept sending the same exam. That’s a tidy story anyway.

You mess up. You grow. You don’t get the test again. Clean. Forward. The kind of progress you can put on a chart.

But that’s not what it does. It comes back.

And lately I’m less interested in why it keeps coming back and more interested in what the rhyme is actually for.

Because a rhyme isn’t a repetition.

If a poem just said the same word twice you’d close the book. A rhyme works because the two words are different, and the echo between them makes you hear both more clearly than you would have heard either one alone. The second one reaches back and changes the first. It tells you something the first word couldn’t say by itself, because the first word didn’t know yet that anything would answer it.

So maybe that’s what the situations are doing when they come around again. Not testing me. Answering an earlier line I didn’t know was a line.

I think about a thing that happened years ago that I wrote off completely at the time. Filed it under bad luck, moved on, didn’t give it another thought. And then something happened recently that rhymed with it so cleanly that the old thing lit up again from the inside. I finally understood what the first one had been, and I only understood it because the second one arrived to rhyme with it.

The meaning showed up late. It almost always does for me. The event happens, and then it just sits there being mute for a long time, and then one day the rhyme lands and the whole earlier thing starts speaking.

I don’t know if life actually does this or if I’m a person who finds patterns the way some people find faces in clouds. Genuinely don’t know. It’s possible I’m just built to hear couplets and the universe is writing free verse the whole time, no rhyme intended, me nodding along to a music that isn’t playing.

But I’ll tell you what changed when I started listening this way. I stopped slamming the book shut on things. The hard moment, the one I’d normally rush to file and forget, I started leaving it open instead. Unrhymed for now. Waiting on its other half. And it turns out the waiting is a much kinder place to sit than the verdict.

A verdict says this is what that was, done, sealed. The open line says we’ll see what answers it.

I’m not telling anyone this is how it works. I’m a guy who noticed a thing in his own life and is still squinting at it.

Honestly not sure if it holds.

Ask me in ten years and the rhyme I’m hearing today might turn out to have been part of a longer line I couldn’t see the end of.

You never get to read your own poem in order.

You’re always somewhere in the middle of it, hearing an echo, not yet knowing which earlier word it just answered.

Or which later one is quietly waiting to answer this.