Past Lives
Claudia made up origin stories for us like it was her job. Always us meeting in a past life, going further and further back until we were two dinosaurs killed side by side in the dino apocalypse. She wanted, seemed to need, for us to be linked. And it wasn’t enough for it to be once, to be this life. It had to be many, many lives: two, six, 15, 37. Romeo and Juliet, Antony and Cleopatra (or Caesar, depending how she felt about me on any given day), a priest and a nun in the dark ages. Even butterflies alighting on the same branch before there were humans for us to be.
It got to be a lot, those stories. She kept them documented in the fifth section of a cheap spiral notebook, a section she’d never need. That way our history was always with her. She could jot down notes on what I did as a man named Charles. Could outline the torrid affairs I had as a Knight of the Round Table, one not very interested in chivalry. In those past lives, I was both the best and the worst I could be. The owner of a home for impoverished orphans; a life-saving doctor at the head of pioneering research; a sadistic military commander with a penchant for pillaging; a Sweeney Todd type.
She blamed me for what I’d done in my past lives, too. I could get in trouble for flirting with the Queen of England. I might not hear from her for days because once I drowned a man. I apparently threw her in an asylum in one life, and she never forgave me for that.
I didn’t know how to break up with Claudia. I’d never broken up with a girl before. Normally, they broke up with me. Even more normally, I didn’t have a girlfriend. We met in Creative Writing 101, a class she was taking on purpose and that I had been dumped into by my freshman advisor who said it would “broaden my horizons.” Code for: you’re undecided on your major, try literally anything to make up your mind. My advisor hated me. Claudia did not. She giggled at how I insisted on making all my poems rhyme ABAB, even after our instructor told me, in front of the whole class, that I should really consider experimenting with other forms if I was going to get anything out of the semester.
“But you don’t want to get anything out of this semester, do you,” asked Claudia over coffee after class. She’d grabbed my arm and dragged me to the on-campus coffee shop without even asking if I was busy. Just whispered, “There you are. Finally.”
I shrugged at her. “I’m undecided, so.”
She nodded sagely. She understood multitudes back then, Claudia did.
We never sat together in Creative Writing, even after we started hooking up. She sat with the other English majors: Lily, with her black nails and black beret and black fishnet tights; Alsabeth, always in cardigans no matter the weather and drinking tea that smelled suspiciously of gin; Vera, who looked really normal until she spoke, and she had this deep, sexy, raspy, otherworldly sort of voice; Gregor, with his hard-to-place accent and cuffed chinos. Claudia sat among them in her high-waisted jeans and Converse and nodded and pointed out metaphors in my work where I hadn’t intended them.
Sometimes, she told me that the past lives were just an exercise in immersive writing.
I’d seen her sharing the notebook with Alsabeth, so it couldn’t be as strange as it felt. Other times, she shrugged and said it was just a joke, that all couples had that one weird thing.
But then there were the days when, after sex, she’d mumble something about me being better at it before, and I’d know that before didn’t mean before I picked up a business major, or before we’d made it official. It meant before I was me. Before my soul entered this vehicle, this post-high-school-varsity-athletics, IPA-drinking, barely-lifts-anymore slab of meat that I am now. It meant she took it seriously. It meant she was thinking about the desperation between us when we were starving on the streets of France, or our reunion after a war, or the years we’d pined for each other while she was married to her second cousin and I was exploring the Amazon, only for us to be wed in our forties, when her husband died of drink.
She left me for Alsabeth, which made sense. Alsa never laughed when she looked at the notebook. I always shifted uncomfortably, avoided making eye contact. Claudia didn’t even bother to tell me. I just saw them, legs intertwined, mouths connected, at the coffee shop, the notebook between them, and figured that was the end. Maybe for all those years, all those lives, Alsabeth was there too. A handmaid, another ragamuffin, a neighbor, a clerk at the apothecary. Maybe, in all these lives, Claudia was trying to get to Alsabeth. Maybe she wasn’t only pining for me for an eternity, but for both of us, and this was the first time our connection was meant to be drunk college hookups, a brief and tepid relationship. Maybe this time it was Alsa’s turn. Which was fine. And then I was just me. Which I didn’t like as much as I thought I would.
Kathryn Ordiway is a technical editor and a fiction writer. She studied English, with concentrations in Creative Writing and Literature, at Saint Vincent College. Her work has appeared in Sledgehammer Lit, Wrongdoing Magazine, and other lit mags. She lives in central Oklahoma with her husband and cats.