The Stranger You Already Know

You don’t talk about it because no one asks.

Because if they did, how do you tell someone they were your child in 1436? That in 1812, you were a farmhand who watched them die of cholera. How do you look a barista in the eye and say, “We were lovers when Rome fell?” They’d ask questions. They’d want to know who they were. And worse, who they weren’t. Most people think they want the truth until they realize it’s all burning libraries and blood-soaked battlefields, until they’re haunted by the echoes of names they can’t pronounce.

But her…

She’s not most people.

She’s standing there in the bookstore, flipping through The Odyssey. A dimple in her right cheek. That same dimple that made you kneel before the altar of Apollo, 2,300 years ago. She’s biting her lip, just like she did when she said she’d marry you—then didn’t.

You don’t mean to stare. But time is a bullet train, and memory’s a station you can never quite leave. In that moment, she looks up, catches your gaze. And you think—maybe she remembers. There’s that flicker, like a pilot light struggling to catch.

“Sorry,” you mutter. “Thought you were…someone else.”

“Yeah?” she asks, smiling.

And you want to tell her. You want to grab her by the shoulders and say, “I was a Spartan, and you were Helen, and I died with your name on my lips while the city burned.” You want to scream that you’ve spent a thousand lifetimes waiting, finding her again and again—only to lose her. You want to beg her to remember the feel of sand beneath a shared tent, the taste of figs stolen from a merchant’s cart. The sound of your voice in her ear as you whispered Stay.

But you don’t.

Because that’s the thing with living forever: the more you know, the more you understand. Some stories aren’t yours to tell.

You just say, “You look familiar.”

She pauses, head tilted, eyes narrowed like a question that’s almost formed. Like a memory half-forgotten. “Do I?”

The universe holds its breath.

But then she laughs, shakes her head. “Maybe we met in another life.”

And in that moment, you want to say Yes. Yes, and you left me for dead in Troy, and it’s taken twenty centuries to find you again. But instead, you just nod, because every lifetime is a punchline. Because you already know how this ends.

“Yeah. Maybe.”

You leave the bookstore.

And behind you, the woman you’ve died a thousand times for, the woman you’ve watched grow old and turn to dust—she walks away.

This time, without looking back.