How many more times must we meet...

When I took you aside and told you we have met a thousand years ago, it was not meant to be a pick up line. It was meant to be a reunion of two old souls.

Eventually, it was only I who recognised you, while you have no inkling of who I am.

The day we met for the third time, you stopped and looked at me. I wanted to say, as I did so many years ago:  It is you.

You've come to me before, in different time zones and different countries. Within the span of six years, you've come in different names, shapes and sizes. In different bodies and nationalities.

Yet, no matter in who you manifest your soul, I never fail to recognise you.

We always seem to be caught in a similar scene - like an old movie replaying itself - international conference, chance encounter at the coffee machine, asking for hot water or cream.

 In Dhaka, you were young, playful, eager to love. In Kathmandu, you were restless, bold and hungry for sex. In Georgetown, you were beautiful, like an arch angle. A little aging, perhaps.

You seem to appear at different stages of your life, to affect me in different stages of my own.

Do you come to challenge me or to give me strength? Why do you come in my darkest, loneliest hour?

When I am on the brink of sadness or contemplating suicide? When I am drowning in my own sorrows as if there is no tomorrow?

In Dhaka, you swept me off my feet and I fell in love; in Nepal, I felt the urgency to flee; in Georgetown, the pain of parting with you was achingly real, torturous, leaving me with a shattered heart.

It tells me that we may never meet again. That this is our last moment, after countless encounters and chance meetings, after loving madly then bruising each other, lifetime after lifetime.

A part of me died when you walk away from me that day.

In Dhaka, it had felt that we were crossing the rubicon, that we would be eternal soul mates; and in Kathmandu, you had turned quite violently away from me.

In Georgetown, I felt we had a history. A history of passion and pain. A history that left me with unhealable scars, unforgetful memories, sad reflections that have marred my skins.

Is this why you have failed to recognise me now? Is this why you remain oblivious to my existence although you continue to trail me?

Perhaps, in my haste to enter this world, in my rush to fulfill my destiny, I have forgotten to drink from the water of forgetfulness.

How many more times must we meet before your memory returns? Let me not wait another thousand years...