Past Lives In No Particular Order

The ancient memory stirs thanks to an unexpected comment.

“Dada, let me tell you my dream.”

As I listened I knew it was true: a thing that did transpire.

Up until this very moment he had never spoken to me of his dreams. Had kept them closely guarded secrets. Treasures of his troubled nights. But suddenly, here, in the golden warmth of my own father’s favorite room, a large room, peering out from the house, large window panes in any place where there could be a view, where the bay expands far to the north and south and you can see so much and so far, here, my son tells me a tale that explains why he grinds his teeth every night.

We were on a space platform. A structure the likes of which we have only imagined and seen in movies. A tower so high that it allowed a fairly large structure to be built in the high mesosphere. He doesn’t tell me what we were doing there, or who built it. I feel like it’s implicit, and so I don’t ask if we’re over our very own Earth. It feels like it must be, but that this takes place in some far distant time. Past or future, it doesn’t matter.

He offers no details about the location. He is trying to communicate and emotional truth, and he has no time for distracting embellishments. He doesn't explain how or why, but he falls. I can see in his face that this was an unpleasant part of the dream, but I’m not ready for what follows. His face darkens.

“You try to catch me. You fall too.”

He lowers his gaze, his whole body contracting with fear, sadness and guilt. He blames himself for a death that even the planet has forgotten. Father and son then, as we are father and son now; he still can’t let go. The deep earnestness of his tone. His body posture. Though it tortured him last night, this isn’t a dream. It’s a memory he’s carried with him from eons ago. My own heart aches at his distress.

It explains a lot about some of his odd behaviors. He’ll apologize for so much. He’ll call himself stupid at the slightest criticism. It might even explain why he loves me so much, favoring me strongly over Mama, and oftentimes forcefully protecting me from her playful pinches and butt smacks. He holds himself as the source of our deaths, and now he wants to protect me and always be close.

Partly as a test, partly because I want to believe that we are not so disconnected from the past as most would have us believe, days later, I tell him, without context,”It was not your fault.” I don’t even have to be too specific; he covers his face with his hands and begins a litany of apologies. There’s no recent event for which he should feel the need to apologize. I wasn’t angry at him for anything. My innocent test of checking his guilt hits on something raw. I want to believe it is the trauma of our deaths. I tell him again it was not his fault, that it was an accident. Unfortunately I don’t believe my present words can quite reach the ancient past, where I could scream to him, over the rushing wind escorting us to our doom, that I am not mad. That accidents happen, and that I love him more and more every day. I wish my hug now could reach the poor boy falling from the sky, that he might be spared ages of guilt.