"Everything Happens Twice" by Eve Robillard

My initial reaction and thoughts about the poem is how it’s all about the mundane route that everyone goes through--experiencing things not for the first time; and by no means the last time either. It’s telling the reader, that situations keep arising in the same manner or in a similar fashion, but the only way it could ever be different is if you yourself takes control and make it different, by handling it differently.

People react a certain way that shows and has shaped their personalities. If you were to routinely go every morning to a local coffee shop and order the same espresso then leave, but wishing somehow that your day was in someway different and not so robotic…the only way you could have that “change” is to actually talk to the person giving you your usual every morning, and learn something new.

However one the very last lines of the poem were read, it changed the dynamic a bit, it encouraged this completely radical idea, to say hello to a drunken man, to sleep with a man that calls you by another’s name. It was puzzling. There was no doubt in my mind that the author wanted to get across the message of the same situations and the same reactions and all. But after reading that last line it changed the tone for me, it changed my original thought of the tone, that was, a more encouraging, a more “get-out-there, you-have-the-power” type tone, to a “it’s hopeless” you will inevitably continue making the same mistakes, just stick to the bad situation, or else it will happen again, and again. Like a broken record.