The Many Paths

I'm a drifter, a squatter. I have no life of my own. I hear it happens sometimes; a soul gets displaced, and is able to wander about between realities to see every possible life he or she could have had. If it sounds glamorous, I can tell you that it's most certainly not. You never feel... comfortable, in a life. Or maybe it's just me, because I found love and searched through so many lives to find my happy ending. I'm still searching.

I met him for the first time when I was 24. We met through work in the life I'd chosen to settle in. I'd known since I was little that no life was truly my own, but by my mid-twenties, I'd decided I had enough skipping about alternate lives.

When we met, it was a taste of destiny. I can't say that there was an angelic chorus, but it was close enough. An immediate connection, the way he looked at me, everything was perfect. If you could overlook the ring on his finger. I wanted to, and maybe on some level he did as well, but that's not the way things work out. It only took a few weeks before I decided to look for a life in which things could have been different with him.

I found him again when I was 14 years old. I was out shopping with my mom, and saw him at the food court with his friends. I stopped by his table, my mom went ahead to order us some food. We made eye contact, and a subtle bell tone played at the edge of my hearing. Deja vu, soul memory, whatever you want to call it. We stared at each other, he smiled slightly, and I turned my head and walked away. 14 was too young for what I wanted from him, and you can't really explain to a man that you've loved him in other lives.

I found him in a life where he wasn't so perfect for me. We were together for a few years before alcohol convinced him it was okay to be verbally abusive... physically abusive. With tears, I left to search for another time in which we could be together.

I found him in lives where I died young. I found him in lives where tragic accidents took him away only years after we'd met. We remained faithful to each other, that was a constant. There was passion, always. I'd never met anyone like him, and didn't care to look further than him. I skipped past lives where we'd never met at all. I wondered, how long can I keep this up? How long will I be allowed to jump between lives until whatever higher power there was decided I'd had enough fun?

There's no real passage of time, for me. I don't know when I'll be satisfied. Maybe when I come to a life where we get at least fifty, sixty years to love each other. Maybe then I'll let my soul move on, die happy as an old woman with spoiled grand children.

I met him again today. I'm in my mid twenties again. His eyes are the same, intense brown that the have been every other time we've met. The sky is a little bluer in this life, not sure why. The sun burns with a warmth that seems more fierce. Maybe some catastrophe will strike us in a few years, and I'll move on again. But he introduced himself in the coffee shop, a script of his spread out before him on the table. His hand was warm, and familiar in a way he'd come to recognize, and a way I'd known from life times spent holding it.

He told me he felt like he'd met me somewhere before, and asked if he could see me again. I smiled, wrote down my phone number, and kissed him on the cheek. He was surprised, pleased, by my confidence. We were meant to be, and I'll look until I find our life together.