Remembrance

By the time the library closed, my head was whirling with hunger and lovely facts. I fairly floated out of the library. Rachel had found the right man for her; she’d found her Jamie. And when she did, she was his faithful, constant companion for thirty-five years, inspiring love wherever she went with her gracious manners and her retiring attitude.

By the time Nora returned to the city the following week, I was swollen with pride in myself at my unparalleled ability to find anything that was buried in a library. And I was smug at having lived such a wholesome, good life. I was so full of myself that it was a wonder I could get through the door of Nora’s office. I was willing to bet that she’d never had a client who could find out so much so fast.

With all the arrogance I felt, I placed photocopy after photocopy on her lap. I even had a photo of this lovely lady. I’d made an intricate chart of dates, dressed it up with lots of different fonts to show off my skill with a computer, and I handed this to Nora with a flourish as I told her everything I had found out about myself.

Nora sat there and looked at me, blinking for a few moments. Then she nearly sent me into a rage worthy of one of my heroines because she started laughing at me. That’s right. She laughed at me.

She didn’t have to tell me why she was laughing because I knew. It was the same laugh my mother used after I’d promised her that I’d behave myself and not get into trouble. I used to promise not to open my mouth and give my opinions on things. I promised to “act like a lady.” I promised all sorts of things but I never seemed able to keep my promises. Life was so very exciting and I wanted to participate and people who participate in life cannot “act like a lady.”

“You don’t think this is me?” I said meekly, thinking how unfair this was. Every person I’d ever heard of who’d had her past lives done always came out as someone exciting. My current life was quite exciting enough, thank you. What I wanted was to read that at some time in the past I had loved a man for thirty-five whole years, that we’d had a life that was one long honeymoon.

Already, I was getting used to Nora reading my thoughts. “You have loved greatly in the past,” she said gently, no longer laughing at me because she could sense that I was truly hurt. “But you are not a woman who…” She hesitated.

“A woman who stands quietly in the background,” I said, feeling as though there was no hope. What was wrong with wanting to be the kind of person who everyone liked?

I no longer felt full of ego and pride. “What’s wrong with me?” I asked. “I write love stories for a living. It seems that love is all I ever wanted out of life. Most people who meet me think I’m hard and cynical but I’m not. I just want what other women have but something is wrong with me.” There were tears at the back of my eyes and I realized that I was being more honest with this woman than with any other person in my life. “Something is wrong with me. I’m defective or something. I seem to be different from everyone else. I had a wonderful man who was in love with me. He was perfect yet I just threw him away. I let him walk out of my life and now I have no one. Just a man on paper. A man who doesn’t exist.”

The tears started coming then, great drops of self-pity, and Nora waited while I got myself together before she spoke.

“In the past,” she said softly, “you loved a man very, very much. You loved him so hard that throughout time you have not been able to forget that love. No other man lives up to the love you had for him, so when you meet a man who you could love, you push him away because you still love this man from your past.”

I blew my nose. “Fat lot of good that does me when I climb into an empty bed at night.”

Nora smiled at me but said nothing.

I sniffed and my brain started working again. “If I still love him, how does he feel about me?”

“He loves you as much as you love him.”

There were so many thoughts in my head that my tongue got tangled trying to get them all out. “You mean that somewhere out there is a man who loves me just as much as I love him and it’s all based on our past lives? Is he looking for me? How do I find him? Is he turning down other women while he waits for me? What do I do?”

Nora’s face had a sad expression on it. “I have told you.”

I am a can-do type person, not one of those acceptance people. I never believe that a person has to accept what is; if you don’t like it, you should do your best to change it. But I could see that Nora was an acceptance-type person.

I took a deep breath. “Can you give me more information about all of this? Maybe if I know more facts, I’ll be able to understand more clearly.” And then I can figure out what to do about this problem, I thought. If there was a man out there who was mine, a man who I just knew was the personification of Jamie, then I was going to do whatever I could to find him.

Nora smiled in a way that I found quite annoying, as though she knew what was in my head, as she started telling me about soul mates. At that term I groaned. If there was ever a more overused word in the world it was soul mate. It ranked right up there with my two most hated words in the world (right after rewrite): utilize and (gag!) snuck. I’d like to erase both of those words from the face of the world.

Anyway, after nearly an hour of back and forth, I think I got the hang of what a soul mate is in psychic terms.

Question: What is a soul mate?

Answer: It’s one of those terms some Californian out promoting a book made up. Like lifestyles. As in, one brainless actor says to an adoring interviewer: “My lifestyle includes my soul mate, Bambi.” Three weeks later, of course, they’re divorced.

In psychic terms a soul mate is the other half of you. Remember in the Bible where it says God made Adam, then took a rib and made Eve? According to Nora that’s how all the first souls were made: one spirit split in half, one male, one female. The very first clones, so to speak. I guess it’s true that there’s nothing new under the sun.

The theory is that the person is your perfect mate. You can be happy with other people but no one is quite like this person. Your soul mate “fulfills your spirit,” as she says.

In theory soul mates should be together every lifetime, but over the centuries things get messed up. Schedules get out of sync. Boys get killed more often than girls. A couple of soul mates are born living next door to each other in Greece, but he falls off a horse and breaks his neck when he’s eighteen; she lives to be eighty. After he’s dead he’s reborn as a Roman gladiator, which makes her old enough to be his mother, as well as their now being quite far apart. So about a hundred years later the time evens out and they’re born living next door to each other again but the fathers have a falling out and won’t let the kids-in-love marry. Etc. Etc.

You can see how soul mates get separated. I have trouble coordinating my Filofax with friends, so I can’t imagine Heaven Control Center trying to get soul mates together over the centuries and around the world.

Considering the impossibility of all this, how do soul mates ever get together? It seems that being put with your other half is a great Gift from God. You have to: (1) ask for your soul mate; (2) deserve this person; (3) accept this person in whatever form he/she happens to be in at the moment.

Considering all this information, how do I personally come into this? According to Nora I have been praying to be given my soul mate for years. With a straight face I said, “Preferably gift wrapped in ribbon and left under the Christmas tree.”

It had taken Nora a while to get the hang of my sense of humor, but we were beginning to spend a great deal of time together. She says that people who come to her are very serious. Considering that people come to her after they’ve given up on therapists and suicide counselors, I could see why they wouldn’t be exactly a jolly little elf.