In Every Life

short fiction

In one life they were a pair of tadpoles, they didn’t make it to frog stage. In another, they were sandhill cranes with elegant legs, who danced elaborately together. Leaping and bounding towards each other, mated for life. In the last life, they met at eighty-one and eighty-two in a rural village in Japan. They lived out most of their final years together, though he died first, and she died six months later. Those months were strange, her not being quite lucid. She almost remembered all their meetings and all their endings in all their previous lives, her brain on the cusp of that life and what lies in between. The nurses chalked it up to the dementia. Talking about being a tadpole was odd, something someone demented might do, though not something they’d heard from any other patient before.

In this life they are now twenty-seven and thirty-two, and their time is almost up. For a moment, just a single moment, in the in-between, where she knew everything, remembered everything, when her soul was just a soul and so was his, she gasped “how much time do we have?”

How much time do they get together the next time around is what she meant. Because in every life they meet, and in every life they end. In some lives they have sixty years together, in others mere moments, minutes, seconds. A glance on a subway. A single mating as fruit flies with a lifespan of only fifty days. A one-night stand. A weekend. A week.

In this life it will be three years. Short, in some comparisons. Eternity, in others. The time they spend in each life without each other is somewhat adrift. Not bereft, not even aware in some cases. But a vague sense of something missing, always, all the time. Other relationships, sure. Evolution is stronger. The urge to procreate and send their DNA on and on. But the mysterious emptiness always remains, even in lives with marriages, and children, and grandchildren– sometimes especially in those lives. They push it down, of course. Pretend it’s normal to harbor a sense of longing for something else unnamed. Everyone feels that way sometimes, right?

She is losing him now. Their time in this life is over, the junction come to pass, and it feels like she is severing a limb. In this life she is Sam and he is Luke. In other lives, she is a man and he is a woman, in some lives they are both men, both women, in others they are sexless, genderless single celled organisms. In some lives their entanglement is not romantic. They are siblings. They are mother and daughter, father and son. In lives where their beings do not consciously experience love– like when they were ancient redwood trees with their roots intertwined for hundreds of years– there is simply a pull, and a push.

Sam is anxiously awaiting a text back. It doesn’t come for a long time. She figures he knows she is leaving, doesn’t want to face it, so he is ignoring her. She scoffs, typical. She leaves her phone in her apartment and forces herself outside as an attempted reprieve. Her lips are chapped and cracked and the blustery cold hurts her face. She breathes freezing ocean air. Wonders why the salt in the air doesn’t melt the frozen slats of wood of the pier. She has to walk carefully, so she doesn’t slip.

She is not conscious of the ancient quality of this connection, and she never will be. She thinks she is simply losing her mind over a guy, and how embarrassing. She’s the one ending it anyway. He does not fit with the life that has been prescribed to this time. After years of being told so many lies about how it should be– that she should be with someone of her own class, and race, and someone who will give her strong, rich, babies– she believes them. She will get married, like she is supposed to, to a nice man. A good man. She will live out a happy life, for the most part. She will pretend the gaping hole inside of her is because of normal things. She will fill it up with normal things. But she will dream of freckles on the face of a woman he was in another life, and she will not understand why this woman comes to her like this. Maybe it’s someone you knew in a past life, her friend will suggest. She will respond: Ha, you know I don’t believe in that shit.

Photo by Liana S on Unsplash