Promise You’ll Find Me Again In Another Life

Let’s meet again in another life when our feet are unchained and we’re simple people looking for a meaning. Sense that meaning in each other when our eyes meet and our hearts recognise the familiarity of a bond that transcends time and space, of a love that didn’t see the end in this lifetime but kept lingering in dreams and tears and every following heartbreak. Come find me when you’re twenty-five, thirty-four, sixteen, or at any age. When you’re a punk kid listening to Metallica in the Mediterranean Sea. When you grow into a carried-away baby-faced professional in Southwest Asia, or a busy businessman always in navy tailored suits signing a deal somewhere in London. Find me when you’re happy, carefree, and self-sufficient. Or maybe lonely, miserable, and broke. Or fed up with a lifestyle that’s too orderly, too suffocating, too superficial. I’ll take you as you come. I’ll explore the rainforest in you regardless.

In another life, you’ll be mine and I’ll be yours, without doubt, without question, without complexity. I won’t have to get anxious about the goodbye I don’t want to hear, or get wrapped up in the thought that someone is so lucky she gets to share the same bed with you every night and see you every morning she wakes up. She gets to spend not just three nights or ten days with you but the rest of her life rightfully in the security you provide. Let’s forget about all the choices you’d made before meeting me, about anyone else in this world. In another life, we will tell endless stories before sleep, spill out funny random thoughts during your morning coffee and my undone omelette. We will travel to strange places, and at the end of each adventure will be planning for the next instead of having one last kiss in silent tears. We will make love by the waterfall and, again and again in the mountains, in different hotels, in Lebanon and Vietnam, on worn-out mattresses, in the middle of flower fields looking up millions of stars, and finally in our own little safe nest. We won’t have to wonder about the universe because the universe is finally answering us.

In another life, I’ll find you before your life takes shape and you’ll find me when I’m raw in the making. We’ll find each other again despite responsibilities and ties and difficult decisions. We’ll hold each other’s hands through all the hardship, till the day you wear trouser braces and all I’m keen enough to do is write about our humbly extraordinary lives.

Meanwhile, in this life, I’ll learn to live without you. Every day is another day I have to accept that I’ll never have you again for however long I might still breathe and let the disbelief wash over me. I knew you so well but I can’t say I know you anymore. We’re both evolving, hence I can only look back on the drifting memories of us to find some solace that our union did once exist. Nothing would change the fact that I felt seen and understood and I had the power to do the same for another precious human being — you. In another life, I’ll find out all there is to know about you and cut open my heart for you. In this life, I might not have such pleasure, but I’m happy knowing that we’ve done the best we could for ourselves, for each other, and the people who are important to us. I hope we’ve changed each other’s life in many meaningful ways we’d never imagined before. I hope you would think of me with a smile on your face, knowing your presence touched me far beneath the surface of my flesh.

Sometimes I’m still upset that life could be so unfair to give me only breadcrumbs of happiness and pieces of you that I’m left yearning forevermore. But if this pain is the price I have to pay for having found the long-missing parts of me, if I could do it all over again, I would rather have you then lose you than never have you at all.