Past Lives In No Particular Order

I am closely acquainted with a northern European woman. She is much older than me. She has a female partner. They care for each other a great deal. Her English is minimal but functional. My knowledge of her language is non-existent. Every time we see each other, we mostly just reflect in each other’s gaze. I have to say it’s something more than visual, though the eyes are involved. We exist in proximity and each observes the whole with the whole. It is as if we know each other. We do know each other, but something sounds in the background, gently ringing the chimes of memory, even though we don’t have a past together. In this life. The pealing bell of this memory vibrates from beyond the mundane.

I can’t remember her words precisely, but she likes me a lot. Appreciates me? Or is protective of me. Or knows that she is supposed to know something about me. We say something similar to each other. I am impressed by you. Something about you is more than interesting. What do we see in each other? Is it because there isn’t much to say, we can let our own inner world run wild with ideas about who this other person might be, and how we are impressed?

I know she is an author. She wrote a book about a local monument. She smokes a great deal and somehow, like many of the Europeans who smoke a great deal, she seems indestructible. I both do and do not want to ask her how we know each other. The dumb answer is that we met thanks to my parents, specifically my father, who made a strong impression on her partner, thus initiating the bringing of our two family units together. But can’t it be something else? There’s no reason I should be of interest to her in a mundane way. I am the mold growing in my father’s deep shadow. Mediocre in every way. But that’s only how I see myself. She sees something else, but I’m afraid to ask what that is.

Living in the liminal space of my fantasy of what this could be is probably better than the truth. Maybe she’s just intrigued by how I refused to take up the academic trappings of my father and his lineage. Maybe she sees me observing her silently, and there’s something about that that she likes. She isn’t one for talking much. For many, being left in peace is a gift. It’s such a strange gravitation. Two planets suddenly orbiting each other. A simple regard we hold for one another. Nothing sensual. Nothing physical. She’s not in my age range, I don’t like cigarettes, and she is very happy with partner. But there is something magnetic that we cannot avoid. We hold each other in high regard, based on so little information, and neither of us dares break the spell by shining a light upon it.

It occurred to me on a night time drive that I might have been a spouse of hers in some past life. I wanted to say husband but it felt more accurate to guess that I had been her wife, and she the husband. Perhaps there is some unfinished business. As I let the thought develop, a great love, though ancient and worn smooth by untold years, began to spread through me. Nothing like my love for my wife and son or current parents. But something solid. Old. Finished but undying. And just enough unfinished business that we had to meet again. Almost tangentially.

Somehow I love you indestructible smoker, or whatever you are on a grand scale, beyond the shackles of our repeating lives. Flesh anew, torn from us, and then foisted upon us again. It is not this flesh that loves you. It is not this name that loves you. A monument of dark, carved, smooth wood creaks gently in the wind of some mighty forest and speaks love. Far away in the shadow worlds of my heart. I think I have to say this to you:

“I love you. I have always loved you. I blame you for nothing. It makes me so happy to know you are happy.”

The context is no longer mine. I hope this feels accurate or at least a little meaningful. That your own heart may be uplifted and made, for a moment, weightless with wonder, that words from another time and space could come through us, bringing a bright message of joy, rather than any kind of doom. Be free of whatever binds us, even in the smallest ways.

I hope we are allowed to dream that there are kinds of memories that lay hidden, in between the walls of our everyday perception. Behind the single hair. In the reflection of light from a bumble bee’s wing. I know I will see everyone again. Let us go about the world, making efforts to turn everyone into someone we can meet for just a few moments, and see that we already know to hold them in high regard.