Soulmates

By Michael Oren

My mother, who passed away at 95 last week, was a lifelong believer in reincarnation. I guess I am, too.

If, as if life, it could have had fists, they’d be swinging. The feet would be kicking, and teeth bared to bite.

“You again!” It shouted, though the universe registered only silence. “You, you traitor, you narcissist, you bastard!”

“And you,” the target of all this fury responded. “You liar, you deceiver, you iceberg.”

In the ether, formless, they went at it. Much as they’d done during my countless intervals before, they railed.

“I loved you and all you did was cheat on me. Sexually, emotionally—how many times? Do you even know?” A person breathing would’ve paused at this point, but breath had no purchase here, no grounds for intermission. “But of course, you did. You kept a list, I’m sure, you egomaniac.”

“What did you expect?” came the agonized retort. “They way you kept yourself unavailable to me. Your body, your heart. I was passionate, I had my needs. Can you blame me for seeking them elsewhere?”

The questions went unanswered except to elicit more wrath. “Your passions were perverse, your needs fathomless. You screwed around because you liked to screw around, because it made you feel big. Made you feel…”

“Immortal.” The confession, whisper-like, lowered the level of the harangue. “But when I got sick, even when the end approached, you didn’t take care of me. You didn’t empathize with my pain.”

From a holler, the reaction subsided to a cry. “You emptied me of all empathy. I was a hollow shell by that stage. A husk.”

“And I was a shriveled leaf.”

They hesitated for a moment, which might have lasted decades or even longer. The truth could often take time.

“So I guess you taught me faithfulness,” one of them finally admitted. “Or the price of not being faithful.”

“And you taught me intimacy and the cost of not opening to it.”

“And we taught each other parenting, how to direct the devotion we couldn’t share to those our union produced.”

“That we have produced, again and again, and will, it seems, forever.”

For this was a conversation they’d had throughout the eons, invariably following each round. Whether between a mother and her paralyzed child, a son to a criminal father. Siblings sometimes, or merely cousins, enemies and friends, but intrinsically, celestially linked. They were together, wounding, damaging, enrapturing, but always teaching. The trick was to figure out what.

“When you were the daughter and I was your grandad,” the wife in this iteration remembered. “You learned to withstand my abuse.”

“And I,” said the former husband, “the albatross of guilt.”

“Then you were a king and I your concubine, too lowly to make me your queen.”

“Yet I loved you.”

“And I, you, but we had to grapple with that loss.”

“It taught us resilience. It taught us suffering.”

“Gratitude.”

“Humility.”

“Hope.”

The silence, formerly detectable by any human ear, became total. If the two of them could’ve gulped, they would’ve swallowed, sighed and wept and embraced. But instead they just wavered there, hovering in the cosmos.

“So, what’s next?” one of them wondered.

“Two men, wed but miserable, forced by their culture to dissemble their affection. Destined to die for it.”

“The purpose?”

“Clear enough, I suppose. The eternal quality of love. The love that nothing, not even hatred, can kill.”

“Now that should bring us closer…”

Though shorn of fingers, they pointed; eyeless, they gazed. The light at the end of the universe beamed brighter it seemed, closer. With no star to claim it, emanating only from itself, it beckoned.

“We’re almost there.”

“That’s what you said last time.”

“Yes, but before it was merely radiant and now nearly blinding.”

“I’m not sure I have the strength…”

“Yes, yes you do.” Extended was the heavenly equivalent of a hand. “We do.”

And so they drew into one another, cojoining, merged, and together they tumbled. Around and around they gyrated, reeling toward the earth and its realities. Ready to awaken bawling and mad as all hell at the prospect of living yet another illuminating life.