I suffer from memory loss as a result of an auto accident, but Letha Kassem, a girl I met by chance while seeking shelter from a downpour has helped me immensely.
I alternate between calling her my soul mate and my Muse
On this particular afternoon, Letha has been using a regression technique to stimulate recall of my lost memories—and surprisingly, I see her in one of my longterm memories.
But the weird thing is that I’ve only known her for six weeks.
And once this strange memory is recovered, a dam breaks within me, as images course through my brain—but they’re not images of my recent past, but of a distant past I’ve totally repressed.
I see Letha beneath a gaslight, her face half-lit.
In another vignette, my arm is around her waist as we stand watching a somber red sunset on a dark winter afternoon.
Then there is a parade of ghostly images of the two of us together in restaurants, at the opera, on crowded streets and riding in a carriage—and inexplicably, they’re all memories of places we’ve been.
“I-I don’t understand,” I stammer.
“I told you I was your Muse,” she whispers.
“What’s happening to me?”
“You’re remembering your past, Jase—our past.”
I’m incredulous. “That’s impossible,” I protest
“You proposed to me by the waterfall one lovely October day—October eleventh, a Thursday to be precise—in 1888.”
As soon as she speaks the words, the memories are there. I feel like a dead soul who drank from the river of forgetfulness trying to forget a past life.
But now the memories are back, along with this aching longing for her so deep and powerful that I can scarcely bear it.
“How could I forget you—and why am I just remembering this now?”
“It’s okay, Jase—it took me a while too. Don’t you remember when we first met? I recognized something familiar about you. Didn’t I did say I felt an affinity for you?”
“You did,” I conceded.
“Well, I went home that night and experienced the same recurring dream I’ve been having my whole life—standing by a waterfall in the dead of winter and being kissed by a faceless stranger—I never saw his face until I met you. It was you all along, Jase—it was you.”
I began to understand. “So you knew if you set the same conditions for me as in your dream, it would spur my memory.”
She nods sympathetically while I sit there speechless—staring at a woman who’s been helping me recover past memories and now has helped me uncover our past life together.
She gently rubs my back. “To be honest, I wasn’t sure you’d remember—especially considering your memory loss, but I certainly hoped you would.”
It’s strange Letha and I—reunited in this time while straddling two widely separated eras. While I’m slowly recovering my memory of my current life, I’m trying to adjust to the recollection of a distant past.
It’s strange the way the mind works disguising truths.
I realized Jessica, the character from my novel, was Letha—the absent woman I was always striving to romance.
She’s not only my soul mate across time, but also my Muse. She’s helped me complete my novel, much to Albert Dean’s delight, and the publisher is gearing up for a large-scale publicity campaign.
I still don’t fully comprehend what’s happened to us, but I’m gaining some insight.
Letha is the inward music I've been hearing all my life—filling me with an ardent longing, I could never understand—drawing me back to where we began.