The Continuous

Part 1 Chapter 4: Friends

I made my way out of the front gate and headed to my car ready to join an old friend for lunch, a very old friend indeed. I unlocked my car and was about to drive off until I got a phone call, an unknown number...or rather an unsaved number. I picked up the call.

"Why aren't you here yet?" She said on the other line.

"I'm on my way," I said.

"Really? By my calculations, you should have been here about 5 minutes ago," she said.

"I'm coming, I'm in the car, driving towards you right now. Just start ordering the food."

"Fine." She said,

I finally arrived and walked into the pizza place, I made my way to the single booth at the back of the restaurant and sat across from her.

"What took you so long? I thought you weren't coming?"

"Even if I didn't show up, you know where I live," I said.

"I do, but would you really want me to go to your home and drag you out?" she said.

"No, you're right. I don't need to explain to my parents why an old lady is asking me to go out with her."

"OLD!" she said, very upset.

"You do know I am only 21," she conveyed angrily.

"Well that's old by my standards, I am only 17. That's a four-year age gap. I shouldn't even be meeting with you here alone, who knows what you might do to me." I said with a smirk.

"Very funny. But no offense, you're not my type," she said.

"Ouch, you don't have to shatter my heart like that," I said.

This is Monica, a tall blonde about 5'7 with hazel eyes and a drop-dead gorgeous body and face, her features being fully American, she was another cursed being like me, who found me by accident. She had been a friend even before we were cursed and we found each other by complete coincidence. If any of us ever want to find each other, we come to an agreed spot to meet, or we come up with a distinct code word that we change in every life.

In our last life (my 21st) we never met so it had been more than 100 years since we had last met. The agreed locations rarely work out because we don't know where we might end up, we don't always come back to the same location.

By coincidence, in my current life, I was walking home from middle school, when I was 13 and it had been 1 year since I got my memories back. On the path that I walked home, the high school bus would drop off their students, and as I walked past the group of students getting off I was thinking out loud. I was reflecting on the life I was just remembering, and anyone listening would think I was just talking about a history book. When you remember your past lives, it hits you all at once that you have not only lived once but just like any other memories things are hard to remember clearly.

I thought to myself, how in my 21st life, I had not met anyone who was also like me. It was then that I said the words, "Should I just start over, Rummanu,." Crystal was the name that Monica had in my 20th life when we met up and decided to come up with a new code word.

I continued walking after having said that, smiling thinking about how funny it would be to meet her again. I was starting to get bored again but maybe it was loneliness that I was starting to experience but never wanted to admit.

As I kept walking a hand grabbed my shoulder and there she was staring me down until she said.

"Why would you need to, I'll take care of you Red," she said.

There it was, our code words that were relating to our very first life. In my 20th life, Monica and I were reunited when we had quite an age gap. I had just regained my memory and was only 10 years old and when I found her, she was already 50 years old.