Past Lives In No Particular Order

It seems like we met in college. Not long after it felt like we had met earlier. Many times. Despite our outer differences, despite my judgemental rage and your unflappable calm and kindness, we could sit together and talk. Endlessly. It bothers me when people say they are old souls, because souls have no beginning. It makes more sense to postulate that we may be old friends. Very old. In the endless span of things, none of us started out as friends, and so it is an incalculably valuable gift to run into someone you have seen before, been a friend to before, even if no one in this world can point to easy evidence of such a past. How extraordinary to share a bond that has survived countless deaths. Countless births.

In the current age we sat in small concrete lacunae, doing our best to be successful parts of the local organism, a college, and barely surviving the greater macroscopic world of the university. While video games may have destroyed many things in my life, for us, and for some others we would know as friends, it made it so that we could talk. If I had not met you in an arena that facilitated discussion, I don’t think I could ever have met you. I appeared at that time as a knife, knowing only how to wound. My poor friends, they named me the ‘King of Spite’. You appeared as a hand most skilled at wielding knives. At reminding them which way the blade should face. At reminding the knife that friends are not enemies, and neither is the self.

In this life you saved me again. In another it was I who saved you. Flying over the desert, geomancers set by warring states against each other. I saw you fall from the sky. Despite the fact that, at that time, you were meant to be my enemy, I could not let you be. Even then it was not pity: something ancient drove me to find your injured form in the sandy maelstrom below. I pulled you from the dunes, doing my best to shield us from both the desert winds and the eyes of our warring colleagues above. The meaninglessness of the fight, the cruelty of it, struck me there, much as something had struck you from the air. We both agreed, it was time to depart that part of that world.

It seems to me that in saving you then I saved us both. Perhaps it was always that way. High up on some basalt wall. Impossibly large. Impossibly high. I don’t remember what had nearly felled me. What the wall was for. Why we were fighting again. Injured, bitter, I expected death. But you took us both from that place. You set in motion one more time the great feat of setting our minds on better vectors. The opposite of a vendetta over life times, we seem to have worked out a deal: let’s get out of here. Let us migrate away from cruelty. Though it may be slow, a progress invisible and hidden over lifetimes, there is a better way to be.

Lifetime and again we have managed to stop undertaking whatever acts of hate and violence others had encouraged us to commit. For who knows how many kings. For countless civilizations on countless worlds. All of them spinning forever downward into the pit of eternal grudges and blind revenge. Somehow, against the greater trend of ignorance, we chose to elevate each other. Until we found ourselves in this imperfect world, where the only battle we had to fight was against the madness of first world culture wars.

Even in this relative peace, I was flailing. You pulled me from a nightmare. You held up your end of the infinite bargain. But this time I failed you. I didn’t have the skillful means or perseverance to reach through your trauma and heal your heart. I owe you so much. Let me find you again. Let me contribute to our ancient pact. Let’s get out of here.