I have spotty memories about my childhood, but one that I actually do remember was when I was in elementary school. When I was a young child, I vaguely recall the teacher bringing the entire class outside to witness a partial solar eclipse.
As a child in elementary school, upon exiting the building we all split off into smaller groups of people we got along well with, as I recall I was with a small group with maybe three other boys. All of this so far could be unimpressive enough to have completely forgotten by now, but upon re-entering the building after the class, the teacher makes certain to point out that if you looked at the eclipse directly, and not through the hole in the paper you are certain to go blind.
What?!? I’m going to go blind?
A traumatic memory that I’m certain I went home and cried off when I went home that evening, and is just a niggle in the back of the mind that pops up every now and again.
A couple of years ago I had a box shipped from my parents, a box that included a yearbook from the very elementary school. Looking though the book brought back mostly nothing, but I was able to recall the face of the teacher that had instilled the fear of vision loss into me at such a young age.
Out of curiosity I did a search on the internet (as people do) to see what became of her. The teacher of my (it turned out to be) first-grade class turned out to have been the founder of the Colorado branch of MADD, after losing her oldest daughter just shy of her 18th birthday, since then she’d dedicated everything she had to preventing that sort of tragedy from happening to others. More recently she had some social media accounts and an apparent happy life as a grandmother, and had retired at almost the age of 70 from teaching, a respected member of the community.
It hardly seems fair to even fault a person who’s lived such a life from bruising a child’s emotions when they’re young by a careless remark.
However… I’d recently sunk myself into the rabbithole of astral projection and deep meditation, and my lack of belief of the subject matter and the pettiness of being moderately drunk worked on my mind.
It seemed real enough, shorter than I imagined myself, looking at the young face of the person I’d previously researched saying “It probably won’t happen immediately, but you’ll definitely go blind.”
and my response, in a small-sounding voice “And I have a prediction for you, you probably won’t remember it. Your firstborn will die before her 18th birthday, and you’ll never quite remember if I said anything about your second-born.”
The searches for her name don’t come up the same anymore.
She never founded anything, and has been in a mental institution since the mid 90’s.
I think I owe someone an apology, but I don’t know who.
AITA?