something long forgotten

Have you ever lost something, but didn’t know you lost it until you found it? Like the odd $20 you find in last years coat pocket? Or a mix tape you made while you were still in high school. You remember all of your favorite songs from that time, and you find yourself singing the words, though you haven’t heard them in an age. And suddenly, you are laughing and remembering long forgotten moments and having feelings that you haven’t felt in years?

I think you must be able to feel that with people. I used to not think so. I used to think this was it, and who we saw was who we saw. That when we met it was the first time, and when people left, that was all there was. But I am increasingly of the opinion that I have lived many lives, and seen many things, and I feel more and more awake lately. I am suddenly seeing everything in a completely different way.

A friend said something to me that really resonated for me- that they felt sad when they saw things happening, not because it was a sad moment, in particular, but because they have been there before. And I felt like that was really profound, that you can be so reminded of something in your past, this life or another, that it overwhelms you with a sadness for that moment that you had lost right up until the moment you relived it. I understood it, that feeling. Not deja vous per se, not living that exact moment, but feeling that situation as though it was already a part of your life experience. You knew it already.

There are times when I meet certain people and I feel completely sure that I have known them for an age. There is an odd familiarity with them, the moment your eyes meet or the first time they speak to you. You know beyond a shadow of a doubt that you have been with them before, that they were already a part of you or your life, and somehow the pieces just fit back in. Its almost as if you both have an in joke you didn’t know until the moment you spoke. And you get this giddy, laughing, not quite real feeling and you smile and you become what some people call "instant friends."

Have you ever had a lover where you felt like they knew you the moment they saw you? Not from experience but from touch? As though you could blindfold them and they would still know every part of you from memory - down to the scars on your knees from when you fell on the playground as a child or the freckle between your big toe and the next. When kissing them feels like coming home and laying in their arms feels like a bed and their breath seems like your own.
I think it’s a beautiful feeling.

And every time I feel it, which has been more and more lately, I feel so grateful and so beautiful that I am in touch with myself, and who I am, and who I was, that I can see these people in my life and remember the specters of who they were to me before. I feel so lucky that I can close my eyes and be there for a moment, in that place where we used to be, and return to it with this sense of belonging that nearly overwhelms.

I want to cry almost. I feel a lot like collapsing and weeping for myself because I was foolish to forget those moments in the transition from the last life to this one. I want to clasp those people in my arms and promise I won’t forget this time around, and hold them tight and remember every moment I had with them before, and dream of all the happy things we can do now that we are back to where we were so long ago.

Its like waking up from a long sleep. From a bad dream where you have all that matters to you taken from you. You can just barely see it, see them and the memory of them, and you can’t quite touch them, and its torture, and then suddenly you’ve wake up and they are there with you and you’re sweating off all of the fear you were feeling moments before.

Maybe none of this makes sense. Maybe this is another one of my silly rambles. But I feel like this so much lately. I feel like I have woken up. And I feel like telling everyone I remember, it is so good to see you at last. To remember and feel at home again. This is happiness. This is love. This is remembering. And to me, its perfect.