It’s an awful feeling, right there in the pit of your stomach, twisting and turning, telling you “something is wrong, something bad is about to happen,” although you haven’t a clue what, or two whom.
Nothing is worse!
You want to do something, stop something, or at the very least warn somebody, but can’t do anything but sit there and worry. You know that if you start calling around asking people if they’re okay, if they are up to anything dangerous or unusual, you are only going to worry them too, and what’s the point of that? So most times we just suck it up, hope for the best and pray a little, asking that somehow, someway whatever our presentimiento was about doesn’t actually happen.
I generally also try to convince myself that it is little more than silly superstition and that I don’t believe in that stuff… right before repeating my ritual once again: worrying, worrying some more, praying, praying again, and then thinking up everything in the world that “the universe” could be trying to warn me about, before going back to square one all over again.
Maybe it’s because my own mother’s presentimientos always seemed to be so accurate in my memories. She’d get an “ugly feeling” and all of a sudden, BAM, something was wrong! It was unnerving to hear her say tengo un presentimiento. My skin would crawl and I would just start bracing myself. Then I got to thinking, maybe it was just that whole theory that if you believe something strongly enough it will come true. I guess that we are channeling negative energy into our lives and that we are really the ones making bad things happen to ourselves.
A little bit too new age, modern thinking for me… so in the years since I’ve adopted my own “Anti-Presentimiento Remedio-Ritual”. Like when I dream a bad dream, I really do believe that if I repeat it out loud, share it with someone else, I am preventing the dream, or the presentimiento, from actually coming true. That somehow I’m putting a block on it, stopping it dead in its tracks.
It sounds silly, but it is kind of comforting… some of the time.