Twice he was ready to give her up, really and truly ready. He knew from the start that he didn’t deserve her and he wanted her to be well. It was bad enough he had screwed up his own life too many times that he had lost count. He knew he didn’t want her to look back on her time with him and regret it all at the end. Maybe it would be okay if she regretted the truly rough times they’d had together, but not the entire thing. And he knew that he should have given her up the first time, really and truly. It just got so much harder after that to do what he knew had to be done. The bond had gotten stronger, less malleable, more like he knew it could be from previous lives. Then again, if it went any way like it had gone in past experience, she wouldn’t really even know what hit her.
He had waited too long, and he knew it in the way her eyes danced when he was around. He had waited far too long, and he could feel it in the heat of air displaced when she entered a room. Twice he had been ready to give her up, but no longer, regardless of the consequences. If this is what Edgar Cayce meant by “souls entwined for all time,” he knew he didn’t stand a chance anyway, but he would never stop trying. Who was he kidding? He had already stopped trying. He knew he was done for and yet his brain kept wrestling with the concept of leaving, of letting her go.
She had originally come to him in a dream, one of those dreams that washes over you in waves, you know the kind. It was her whisper that first captivated him, and he knew she was real. He instantaneously knew that she really and truly existed somewhere else in the universe, somewhere solid. In that same instant he knew that they were destined to be, and yet were also destined to decay. There was something about the idea of her, though, that drew him in and he could never let it go. Not even when they met. Not even when it was obvious she shared the same connection. Not even when he knew it could kill them both.
And now he was really and truly stuck, knowing as he did that the glory of the moment would be lost in the hurt and pain of loss, because at the moment of their meeting a clock started ticking, a clock that ticks for only them, a clock that ticks down the time until their destruction. He recognized it for what it was, although she was oblivious to its existence. He also recognized the part of the prophecy that no one else knew: the soul was never really and truly meant to come back together. The separation of the soul was not happenstance but meant to be, and humans were not to trifle with it. Unexpectedly though, he, an immortal, had found his soulmate and it always ended badly. When the clock ran out, their time would be up and they would die in each other’s arms. However, if he were to let her go she would live her destined amount of time and not die until old age. He could never leave her alone, though, in any life. Even after he had made up his mind to do so — twice — he had gone back on it and taken her back into his arms.
He realizes now how selfish he had been, but he cannot change or re-chart the path of future history. They are both destined to live in this never-ending loop, and the really and truly saddest part of it is that while her part of their shared soul keeps being reincarnated, she doesn’t remember a thing, while he remembers every single time, every single death. And he doesn’t know what is better, the single life she lives each time, followed by a blissful death with her beloved, or letting her live her life without him.
Twice, he was ready to give her up, but he sighs as he realizes the cycle will never end, and he readies himself for the embrace of death, once again, in her arms.
Sam
Sam's Online Journal 