My Name is Memory

by Ann Brashares

“If he liked you, you would know it,”

How many times could you give up on someone you loved?

He thought of the Appomattox campaign, the Battle of High Bridge. How much blood had soaked into this river? And yet the river flowed. It cleansed itself and forgot. How could you cleanse yourself if you couldn’t forget?

I’ve learned since then that it’s not that unusual for very young children to have memories from their old lives, especially if they suffered a violent death the last time around. Or maybe the violence gives them a more urgent need to communicate. Typically they express old memories as soon as they can talk and keep pressing them for a couple of years. And typically time passes and they get further away from their death and their parents get spooked or just fed up. The memories fade, and they put them aside.

can. It’s not so different from the way you can know a person when she is twenty years old and recognize her again when she is eighty, though every cell in her body has changed in the meantime. There is almost nothing you could program a computer to do, by observation alone, that would allow it to recognize a person at such disparate ages. But we can do it. Animals can do it.

One thing I can tell you from my unusual perspective is how powerfully our souls reveal themselves in our faces and bodies.

Doubts, compromises, and disappointments little and big—those usually reside around the eyes,

but there are no rules. The hopes usually lurk around the mouth, but so do bitterness and tenacity. A sense of humor is easy to spot around the eyebrows, and so is self-deception.

People sometimes talk about the power of first impressions, and believe me, there is truth to it. The path of your life can change in an instant. Not just the path of your life but the path of all your lives, the path of your soul. Whether you remember or not. It makes you want to think hard before you act.

But certain souls cohere. It’s rare but possible. Certain souls pair up eternally, not unlike geese or lobsters. I’ve witnessed it a few times. But it takes two powerful wills to make it

Recording is not the same as doing, my old friend Ben would tell me, remembering is not the same as living, but the older I get the more it seems to me the best of what little I have to offer.

Your death is the shadow of your life. If you have strong and loving attachments in your life, you will cohere to your community of souls. You will probably come back to life quickly and among your own people. Your lives will occur in clusters geographically and ethnically. When you go to a new place, you’ll often migrate among your loved ones. If your community is ethnically mixed, you’re more likely to change race, and if not

you probably won’t. If you are distant and misanthropic, selfish or cruel, you will find yourself alone in life and death.

I know

that gradual change is the easiest to take, and the giant leaps and losses can overwhelm you.

Usually it’s devotion that keeps people together through lives, but the soul’s basic yearning for balance and resolution can sometimes bring a person back to confront a previous torment.

Without my name, my story is no more than a long and haphazard tangle of memories.

The worst I can accuse them of is parental blindness, and that is something they share with nearly all those who love their children.

I guess I was better at loving then, too, and also better at being loved—the two go together.

“You forget your victories, but you remember the losses.”

(Some skills are in the mind and some are in the muscles, and I have spent lifetimes learning the limitations of the first and the value of the second.)

There are short periods of joy you have to stretch through a lot of empty years, me more than most. You have to make them last as well as you can.

It was the rhythm of human enterprise to invent and worship some new approach, to fully reject it a generation later, to realize the need for it again a generation or two after that and then hastily reinvent it as new, usually without its original elegance. Scientists hated to look backward for anything.

Sometimes I find myself wishing that dogs lived as long as people do. I think my life would be considerably less lonely.

As he saw it, anticipation and habit were two of the nastiest parasites of old souls and long experience. They fed on repetition and crowded out your eager senses over time until nothing felt new anymore. There were things he wished he could touch for the first time again.

it was smell that carried memory.

Although very young children were kind of homogenous, people pressed their souls into their faces and bodies fairly quickly in a life, and more and more deeply as they aged.

If you changed gender from one life to the next, it almost always meant you lived in some confusion in the middle.

But if the East strikes you as ancient and wise and the West foolish and new, there probably is some basis for it.

You see, while some souls go out with the achievement of wholeness or balance, others end out

of pure discouragement. As I’ve said, it’s desire more than anything else that keeps us coming back for more. When your business is finished for better or worse, that is usually the last of you.

It’s a strange thing. With each birth your body starts out fresh and mostly blank, but then you print yourself on it, over time. You hold on to old experiences: injuries, injustices, and great love affairs, too.” I glanced up at her. “And you hold them in your joints and your organs, and wear them on your skin. You carry your past with you even if you don’t remember any of it.”

Those memories are in there somewhere. You act on them in ways you don’t realize. They determine how you respond to people, the things you love and the

things you fear. A lot of our irrational behavior would look more rational if you could see it in the context of your whole long life.”

“Although most psychics, if they are any good, do have some memory of old lives. And so do most of the people we consider insane. An asylum is about the densest concentration of people with partial memory you will ever find. They get flashes and visions but usually not in the right order.”

“This didn’t happen by accident. You have been with me from the very first life. You are my first memory every time, the single thread in all of my lives. It’s you who makes me a person.”

“This is not me. This body is breaking down, but I am not.”

rebirth comes from wanting to live. Suicide is rejection; it’s the end. If death is truly what you choose, you might not come back after that.”

There was a satisfaction in being right and a terror in finding so much evidence that the world didn’t work the way you or most other people thought it did.

Part of the danger of living so long, knowing you were going to come back and back again, was putting off your life until you never lived it at all. Just so it was possible. Just so long as you could, you never actually did. Just so you didn’t ruin it.

You don’t so much appreciate the getting, but you mind the losing.

You won’t be like this for long. You’ll be young and strong again soon, I was saying to her over and over in my head.

“Love who you love while you have them. That’s all you can do. Let them go when you must. If you know how to love, you’ll never run out.”

“You remember what is lost, and you forget what’s right in front of you.”

Fear almost always trumped joy, but not today.

And if the worst happens, I’m dying with you before I’m living without you.”

“At the worst possible moment, the most painful, darkest moment when you can’t take it anymore and you are afraid, that is when a feeling of peace and comfort will come over you, and it’s like nothing you’ve ever felt.”

I don’t want to wait around for things to happen anymore. I’ve spent too long doing that. I get defeated or discouraged, and I die because I figure there’s always a new life and it will be better. But nothing can be better than this life, because I have you.”

Love demands everything, they say, but my love demands only this: that no matter what happens or how long it takes, you’ll keep faith in me, you’ll remember who we are, and you’ll never feel despair.