Never Never: Part Three (Never Never 3)

I rub the nerves out of the back of my neck while I lock eyes with her. “Charlie? What if…when we broke up…we screwed with destiny?”

I wait for her to laugh, but instead, a rush of chills covers her arms. She makes to rub them away as she slowly takes a seat back down on the bed. “That’s ridiculous,” she mutters. But there’s no conviction in her words, which means maybe a part of her thinks this theory is worth exploring.

I sit down in my chair again and position myself in front of her. “What if we’re supposed to be together? And messing with that caused some sort of…I don’t know…rift.”

She rolls her eyes. “So what you’re implying is, the universe wiped away all of our memories because we broke up? That seems a little narcissistic.”

I shake my head. “I know how it sounds. But yes. Hypothetically speaking…what if soul mates exist? And once they come together, they can’t fall apart?”

She folds her hands together in her lap. “How does that explain why you remembered this time and I didn’t?”

I pace the room some more. “Let me think for a minute,” I say to her.

She waits patiently while I rub the floor raw. I hold up a finger. “Hear me out, okay?”

“I’m listening,” she says.

“We’ve loved each other since we were kids. We obviously had this connection that has lasted our entire lives. Up until external factors started getting in our way. The thing with our fathers, our families hating each other. You holding a grudge against me for believing your father was guilty. There’s a pattern here, Charlie.” I grab the notebook that I wrote in earlier and look at all the things we naturally remember and all the things we don’t. “And our memories…we can remember things that weren’t forced on us. Things we had a passion for all on our own. You remember books. I remember how to work a camera. We remember lyrics to our favorite songs. We remember certain things in history, or random stories. But things that were forced on us by others, we forgot. Like football.”

“What about people?” she asks. “Why did we forget all the people we’ve met?”

“If we remembered people, we’d still have other memories. We’d remember how we met them, the impact they’ve had on our lives.” I scratch at the back of my head. “I don’t know, Charlie. A lot of it doesn’t make sense still. But last night, I felt a connection with you again. Like I had loved you for years. And this morning…I didn’t lose my memories like you did. There has to be significance in that.”

Charlie stands up and begins pacing the room. “Soul mates?” she mutters. “This is almost as ridiculous as a curse.”

“Or two people developing in-sync amnesia?”

She narrows her eyes at me. I can see her mind working as she chews on the pad of her thumb. “Well then, explain how you fell back in love with me in just two days. And if we’re soul mates, why wouldn’t I have fallen back in love with you?” She stops pacing and waits for my answer.

“You spent a lot of your time locked up inside your old house. I spent all that time looking for you. I was reading our love letters, going through your phone, reading your journals. By the time I found you yesterday, I felt like I already knew you. For me, reading everything from our past somehow connected me to you again…like some of my old feelings had come back. But for you...I was barely more than a stranger.”

We’re both sitting again. Thinking. Contemplating the possibility that this might be the closest we’ve come to any sort of pattern.

“So what you’re suggesting is…we were soul mates. But then external influences ruined us as people and we fell out of love?”

“Yeah. Maybe. I think so.”

“And it’ll keep happening until we set things right again?”

I shrug, because I’m not sure. It’s just a theory. But it makes more sense than anything else we’ve come up with.

Five minutes pass while neither of us says a single word. She finally falls back onto the bed with a heavy sigh and says, “You know what this means?”

“No.”

She pulls up onto her elbows and looks at me. “If this is true…you only have thirty-six hours to make me fall in love with you.”

I don’t know if we’re on to something, or if we’re about to spend the remainder of our time chasing a dead end, but I smile, because I’m willing to sacrifice the next thirty-six hours for this theory. I walk over to the bed and fall onto it beside her. We’re both staring up at the ceiling when I say, “Well, Charlie Baby. We better get started.”