The Last Time We Met

1

I found the photograph at an antique store.

I liked to drift through antique stores on weekends, touching the old chair that was once someone's favorite spot to curl up with a book, gazing at the quilts that someone had sewn by hand. "James is an old soul," my mother often said, but she had never liked anything old: our house was a modern style, angular and minimalist, and filled with the newest everything. Technology was updated the moment a new model came out, clothes from last season were donated, cars were leased so she could upgrade every couple of years.

In the secondhand stores and co-ops I felt more at home than I felt at home. I had rebelled against my mother with a record player and an old-school Pentax camera that used – gasp – film. Old photographs were an obsession with me. I wasn't sure why, until I found that one in an old cigar box atop a Georgian-style chest of drawers.

Her face had the dour look of those serious Victorians, who seemed to think smiling was beneath them. Dark hair framed her face, and a big bow perched atop her head. She wore a light-colored dress with the requisite frills, and she sat in a chair with her ankles primly crossed.

Nothing about the photograph was different from the hundreds of others I had looked at that day, and yet I found myself going back to it, removing it from the wooden box and laying it aside, then staring at it again trying to understand what exactly it was about this girl that made me want to take her home with me.

"I always feel bad for the photographs," said the shop owner from behind me. "All those people whose families have forgotten them."

He talked me into buying an ornate brass frame for the photograph that would make my mother wince every time she saw it, and sure enough, I often found the portrait facing away from my open bedroom door when I came home from school, as if she couldn't bear to look at it.

My mother wasn't the only one disturbed by the photograph, however.

"That's creepy," my best friend Eli said when he came over to study for a chemistry test a few weeks later. He picked it up and looked at it more closely, screwing up his face. "Is that, like, your grandma or something?"

"No." I thought about not saying anything more. Sometimes that worked with Eli – he was a chatterbox, and we balanced each other out. But my mouth kept talking. "I found it at the antiques store and just... I don't know. Felt a connection, or something."

"Ugh, you should talk to my aunt Lula. She's all into that stuff." He waved his hand around in the air.

I furrowed my eyebrows. "Old photos?"

"No! Connections," Eli drawled the word, and swayed a little. "Mysterious feelings. The ether. Astrology... crystals... all that stuff."

"I just liked it," I said, rubbing my bicep awkwardly. "Is it so wrong to like an old picture?"

Eli put the photo down, giving it the side-eye, then slung himself onto my bed. Propping his chin up on his elbow, he said, "Aunt Lula would say you felt a connection because of your past lives, or something."

"It's just a photo," I repeated. "Come on, you're going to fail chemistry if you don't study at least a little."

"I'll just cheat off of you," Eli teased. But he dropped the subject and we did some actual studying.

That night, however, all I could think about was the photograph.

I always knew, even as a child, that I'd had other lives. Once, when I was four, I drew a picture of a dog in crayon and labelled him Jocky. "We're not getting a dog," Mom told me. "Daddy's allergic." I didn't have the words then to explain that I'd already owned Jocky, in some other time. Another time I told my mother that I once fell out of a tree and broke my arm, when I had never climbed a tree in my life.

And of course, there was my birthmark.

It was the type of birthmark they call a port-wine stain, large and dark purple in color, on my upper left arm. When I was younger, I called it my tattoo. It does look a bit like a fuzzy approximation of a heart with some scrolly bits coming off it. Mom liked to tell that story to her friends on their wine nights so much that I stopped calling it that. As I got older, the birthmark always invited a comment, and by middle school I had taken to never showing it to anyone. Even when I went swimming I wore a t-shirt that covered most of it.

In the dark I tried to imagine if the girl in the photograph might have been someone I once was. As soon as I had the thought, I knew it wasn't right. Not just because she was a girl and I was a boy. That connection I felt with her, that was something different.

Past lives, Eli had said. I returned to that same antique shop the following weekend. It stood to reason that the photograph had come from an estate sale, and I might be able to find some item connected to her. I was sure I would feel some kind of energy emanating from an object that would call to me, as the photograph had.

"What are you doing?" came a voice behind me as I stood before an open jewelry box with my hand held above it.

"Uh, nothing." My face aflame, I turned to see who had spoken. It was a boy with purple hair, shaved on the sides. With his neon yellow print shirt, he could not have looked more out of place in an antiques store.

He narrowed his eyes and smirked, leaning in. "You're clearly doing something."

His gray eyes crinkled, and I realized I was staring. Heat crept up my neck as I forced my gaze down to the jewelry box.

"Really, I wasn't doing anything. I swear. Just browsing." I rubbed my arm, where my tattoo was, and suddenly he had grabbed my wrist and shoved my sleeve up. "Hey!"

"That's..." he was staring at my birthmark with his mouth open. My birthmark had earned a lot of stares over the years, but never one this bold.

"Let go!" I jerked my arm away and covered it with my sleeve, what little there was. It was ninety degrees outside, so naturally I was wearing a t-shirt. I didn't have anything long-sleeved to cover it further. Stupid habit, rubbing my tattoo that way. "What, you've never seen a birthmark before?"

He looked at me then, and slowly pushed his hand up his own arm, lifting the sleeve. He had a port-wine stain, too. Only his looked more like a star.

My mouth opened and closed a couple of times, like I was a dying fish. I felt a bit like a dying fish. I couldn't seem to get enough air. What were the odds? "That's crazy," I managed to say.

"I'm Cedric," he said finally, letting his sleeve drop and holding out his hand.

I shook it. "James."

I relaxed my grip, signaling that the handshake was over, but Cedric continued to shake my hand slowly up and down. "James," he mused, continuing to gaze at me. I could feel my body start to sweat for some reason. "James," he repeated, this time making it a statement. "James, would you like to go get some coffee with me?"

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So, clearly, this story deals with past lives.  Do you guys believe in reincarnation? Have you ever had an experience that made you believe in it?