Plot Twist Squared
“My girlfriend of two years moved a couple hours away to go to school. We saw each other most weekends. The weekend before Valentine’s day, we were together, and it was great. The next weekend on Valentine’s day, I went to see her at her parents’ home. As I was walking up to the house, I saw through the window that she and another man were showing her parents an engagement ring.
And now for the second plot twist. They got married and after six years, she discovered his other wife and kids. He must have been a sweet talker, all right.”
Some Things Just Aren’t Meant To Be
“I was best friends with a neighbor kid growing up. He was always over at my house or I was at his, and I had a major crush on him pretty much since I was old enough to walk. But it never seemed like he liked me back or that he even noticed that I liked him. As we grew up, he started dating people, and I was really jealous about it. So I started dating people while still pining for him. I figured he just saw me as a little kid (I was a year younger than him) or a little sister and nothing would ever come out of it, so I tried to put my feelings aside. Then when he turned 16, his family moved out of state and we lost contact. I got over my feelings and time moved on.
Fast forward a few years later. We reconnected online, started talking, and then this dude casually mentioned in a conversation that he had a giant crush on me growing up and always wanted to ask me out. He told me that he even asked my mother for permission to ask me out, and she said no, so he never ended up doing it. My mom never told me about this, at all. My mind was blown. My entire childhood of pining after this guy—my first ever crush—felt like a lie. At this point, I had long since put aside the feelings I had had for him, and I had kinda gotten over the crush, but I still felt a lot of residual nostalgia from being 15 and craving intimacy for the first time in my life. He was still into me and I was debating whether I wanted to start something with him or not, mostly so I wouldn’t have to live with the what if of it all. I tossed the idea around while we kept in touch.
Then, suddenly, he stopped messaging me. I was confused because our talking was going well, and I didn’t think I had done anything to make him want to start ghosting me. I messaged a mutual friend of ours and asked if she knew what’s up and she told me the guy was arrested for beating a guy who owed him money to death.
He’s in prison right now serving a life sentence. I never got with him.”
The Bible Foretold It All…
“During my freshman year of high school, my sister gifted me a Bible. It was leather bound, and she’d written ‘inspiring’ phrases on the leaves and underlined various verses that meant something to her.
During my senior year of high school, I was in a bad car accident. I mean BAD. I almost died and spent the majority of the year in the hospital or rehab, plus a chunk of the next year.
Years pass. I found the Bible on a bookshelf. I’m flipping through the pages when I find some random numbers written on one of leafs, separated by dashes. It was a date.
It was the date of my car accident. Which occurred three years after I was given the Bible.
I later asked my sister about it, and she didn’t remember why she’d written that.”
She Always Thought Tiffany Was The Epitome Of Feminine Grace
“I used to have a friend named Tiffany in middle school. I wasn’t so good with people, and I was a little rough around the edges. I was very jealous because she was incredibly dainty and feminine while I was a begrudging tomboy. In middle school, her very sketchy and violent father withdrew her from classes and we lost contact. She was homeschooled for a while, and then she and her mother escaped to a battered women’s shelter and set up a new life in Kentucky. I learned all this from the grapevine.
I found her mother, brothers, aunts and uncles on facebook, so why couldn’t I find her? Over the course of two years, I searched every few months for her online, desperate to reconnect and apologize to the friend I had such intense jealousy for, and explain that I was unintentionally rude because I envied how feminine she was, while I felt like a brick wall of a girl.
Finally, one day, her mother replied to my friend request and I found out the reason that I never could find her name on Facebook:
HE goes by TJ now!”
Sometimes, Jokes Turn Out To Be True
“I taunted my little sister her entire life about the fact that she looked nothing like me and our dad. I always made ‘you’re adopted’ jokes about her and stuff. It became an inside joke between us—I’d tell her we found her on the doorstep and she’d say, ‘Thank god, that means I’m not actually related to you.’ My parents kind of frowned on it because it was ‘mean,’ but my sister could take a joke, and she knew I was just teasing her; she joked about it herself.
I found out a couple years ago that she was the product of a short-lived affair. My dad accepted her as his own and my parents kept it a secret from everyone. They told her last year. I still make ‘maybe you’re adopted’ jokes about her, but they’re 100x funnier now.”
Their Ancestry Research Turned Up More Than They Thought
.jpg){kind=link}
“I’ve grown up hearing about my Cherokee ancestry from my dad’s side of our (very southern) family. One of my cousins has gone on a spiritual journey and has spent a good amount of time researching his Cherokee heritage and connecting to our familial roots.
The 2-minute version of the family story tells how a patriarch of my family met the woman of his dreams and moved out into the forest to live like a true Cherokee father would. He left the rest of our family behind.
Several years ago, my grandmas got very into Ancestry.com. As they researched our tree, they found that we actually have no Cherokee blood. However, my great-great-great grandmother was a black woman (I think that’s enough ‘greats’).
It makes me so happy to think about my racist uncles and extended family finding out that we are 0% Cherokee, and that my generation is 1/16 black. The further you go up my family line (and, therefore, the more racist my family becomes), the more black we are. I love it.”