The Last Time We Met

6

The dreams started out as brief glimpses of a life long past. Standing near the ocean, women walking by wearing long dresses and big hats. A girl's laugh that gave my stomach the same fluttery feeling as Cedric's. Riding a bicycle. Ducking under the curtain of an old camera. Over the next few weeks, these dreams fitted themselves into a story that I couldn't stop thinking about in my waking hours, especially when I looked at the photograph on my nightstand of the dour girl glaring back at me.

I began to experiment. The dreams were more intense, more vivid, when we slept touching each other. When he rested his bare skin on mine, I caught bits of smells, specific details. And so often, he would fall asleep with his lips pressed against my forehead, and the memories would sweep me away.

In a little black moleskine notebook I wrote down the bits I remembered. After weeks of that itching feeling of a memory just beyond my grasp, all I had were pages of lists like this:

Near the ocean – still California?

Maybe turn of the century

Was I a photographer? If I took the photograph of the girl, look up photography studios?

and

Colored lights – that song??

Lyric: something knew, only you

Brent Marshall

Chris ???? friend Lisa?

Los Angeles

80s

There were other lists with even fewer things on them. One just had the phrase smells like smoke and another had a single word: desert.

The trouble was, the dreams were like glimpses that I couldn't always hold onto when I woke up.

I hadn't yet broached the idea of past lives with Cedric, not seriously, even though I talked about it with Eli almost constantly.

"I have the feeling that something really bad happened," I told Eli during lunch at school one day in late September. Cedric and I had been together for three weeks at that point. "Like, one of us died, or something."

"Obviously one of you died." Eli waved a French fry around like it made his point. "You both died. You know, because you were reborn."

"Yeah, but it was a really bad death. A tragic death."

"I was looking up movies about past lives and there were, like, three movies about dogs getting reincarnated." Biting into the fry, Eli mused, "Do you think there was a life where Cedric was your dog?"

"No," I said.

"What about Cedric's dog?" asked Meagan, the girl Eli was dating that week. She pulled her chair right next to his and kissed his cheek. The look in his eyes foretold a breakup in the near future. "I want to meet Cedric. Let's go on a double date!"

"Cedric's dog is named Henry," I said.

"That's not a dog name," Meagan said at the same time that Eli said, "We weren't talking about Cedric's dog. We were talking about how the past life movie genre is filled with dog movies, which is absolutely ridiculous."

Meagan squealed. "Oh, like A Dog's Journey! I love that movie. Elijah, we should watch that together. It's so good."

"Maybe that could be our double date," I said, meeting Eli's dead gaze.

I found a few books at the library, but as Eli said, there wasn't much by way of movies. Cedric and I ended up watching A Dog's Journey one night, though it did not help to illuminate my situation. The books were so anecdotal as to be useless. Past lives couldn't be proven by science.