The Forgetting Time

by Sharon Guskin

“I guess—I wanted him to be all mine.” He laughed. “You think that’s funny?” He had a smile that took up his whole face. Like Noah’s smile. Like Tommy’s. “Lady, no offense, but you don’t know anything,” Charlie said. “He was never all yours.”

Janie pulled the curtain and closed the door gently and left her palms there, resting her forehead against the door. One breath, then the next. That was how it was done. One breath, then the next.

He had been thinking more seriously about karma lately. He had never focused on it in his work—it was hard enough to find verification that consciousness continued, without getting mixed up in the complexity of ethical ramifications across time—but occasionally he had run searches of the data, trying to see if there was a connection between the kinds of lives people led and their next lives. There was nothing conclusive, although a small fraction of those in peaceful or affluent conditions remembered previous lives in which they’d meditated or behaved in a saintly way. He’d had his own thoughts lately, though, that ignorance and fear and anger, like trauma, could perhaps be transferred from one life to the next, and that it might take multiple lifetimes to overcome them. And if anger and fear could persist—then also, of course, stronger emotions could as well, such as love. Was that what drew some people back to reincarnate within their own families? Was that what caused some children to remember their past connections? And if so, then perhaps this phenomenon, these children’s memories he had studied so carefully, was not against the laws of nature, after all. Perhaps it was the foundational law of nature that they were proving, what he’d been documenting and analyzing for over thirty years without knowing it: the force of love. He shook his head. His brain was going soft, maybe. Or maybe not. He’d kept so many of these questions at bay all these years, and now they whirle...

But surely we all carried some little piece of each other inside of us. So what did it matter, whether the memories belonging to her boy existed inside this other one? Why were we all hoarding love, stockpiling it, when it was all around us, moving in and out of us like the air, if only we could feel it?

It was terrifying, but there was nothing to be done. Her heart was cracked open now and the whole world could come on through.

She wanted to ask Denise but didn’t have the courage. “I suppose by the time they are teenagers you know them pretty well inside and out.” For the first time, Denise cracked a smile. “Are you kidding me? I don’t know half of what’s in Charlie’s head most of the time. He just—disappeared on me.”

They stood together in silence, the air between them alive with the wonder of everything they didn’t know.

You Only Live Once. That’s what people said, as if life really mattered because it happened only one time. But what if it was the other way around? What if what you did mattered more because life happened again and again, consequences unfolding across centuries and continents? What if you had chances upon chances to love the people you loved, to fix what you screwed up, to get it right?