MY THEORY OF OUR REINCARNATION: A MEMOIR

I don’t believe in past lives but there’s something that makes me curious about our present realities. In this life alone, I’ve found you thrice at least.
Time blurs my memory of the details, but the first time was in Junior Class 3 and I often still hear the echoes of our dry jokes and random conversations about everything. I possibly didn’t understand how much you cared till the time when I naively started harvesting enemies off our class mates- up until my cup starred running over. Like a maize cob, I clothed myself with countless seeds of anger and sadness, fenced my heart so I wouldn’t feel the pain of their hard words or misdeeds. But in that small number of humans who decided to look beyond the layers of this broken timid girl to comfort her, I found you. For the second time. It may have been then that I started seeing you a little more differently; more consciously. After Jumy, perhaps you became the next important figure in my life for that time. And even when we stopped talking and my attention shifted to other people and things, I still thought of you often.
“Deola”, you’d said more than once, “ You’re very pretty no doubt, but you’re neither the most beautiful nor the most perfect girl I’ve ever come across…”, and just i thought i would shatter into a thousand pieces of disappointment, you finished by saying, “…and that’s the thing I don’t understand. There’s something special about you that I haven’t completely figured out. I don’t know why I like you this much.” you said in a sort of perplexed tone, then whispered, “I think I’m obsessed!”. We’d both laugh, with my heart suddenly glowing up with warmth. Then you’d spend the rest of the time cursing because you were angry at your parents for making you younger than me since age was my silly excuse for us not working out. And I’d laugh hysterically, as we went on to discuss other things. It was an occasional conversation we never really grew tired of.
The night you finally asked me to be your girlfriend, I was rid of a good nights’ sleep, and was instead tormented by the fact that I hadn’t accepted the idea of a younger, less nerdy partner. I didn’t realize this same package would track me down for the next three years and present itself in a different parcel called Manny. He was everything I wasn’t, just like you. Everything my ex before him wasn’t- the ex who was supposed to be my ideal man, yet who dumped me barely 2 months into our relationship. Manny was many things I ran away from in a guy, my perfect definition of imperfection. And he gave me the next few years of complete love and adoration, with me never realizing that my acceptance of him was finally my acceptance of you. You birthed my new perceptions of love and the indefiniteness of it. I imagine a part of your essence trailing me all those years to teach me that priceless lesson, for that third time that I’d see you.

I absolutely, positively, sincerely do not believe in past lives, but I think there may be a hidden secret buried in the belly of the universe about how we came to be in this present day and about why I feel this way for you. If reincarnation were true, I try to picture what we’d have been say 112 years ago. Maybe an old Jamaican couple in a little bungalow by the country side, or maybe two lover flamingos hunting for salmon by a creek.
Because I’m a violent advocate for honesty, I won’t lie that I’m desperately in love with you. In fact, I’m still super upset that I never told you how much you meant to me at the time, but still, there’s a tiny portion of my heart that beats for a reality where you and I spend the rest of our days in senseless devotion to each other.
This is my theory of our reincarnation.
— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — FOR EMEKA
