Old Soul

Julia Rouillard

“Do you believe in past lives?” I ask Talia, feigning nonchalance by scrolling through my phone. Sam Smith plays through the speaker on the wall.

“I’ve never really thought about it.” She pauses and stares at the corner of the ceiling. “I mean, humans are wrong about pretty much everything so if the popular opinion is no, I’m inclined to think otherwise.” I put my phone down and pick at the comforter. My nails scratch against the fabric. “Have you ever thought about your own? If you had them, I mean.”

“In passing, sure. Like, I can’t walk up the stairs if someone’s behind me. I have to run. And no one’s ever, you know, chased me up the stairs and tried to kill me, but that’s all I can think about.”

I nod slowly. Do I tell her? Will she think I’m crazy? I run through the same thoughts until they blur together and my vision slides out of focus; the gray flowers on my comforter blend together.

“I remember how I died,” I blurt out, sitting up. So much for subtlety. Talia snorts, then looks up and sees the look on my face. “What do you mean?” she asks. Her eyebrows are furrowed but she’s still sprawled out on the bed. She’s trying not to react. I start to backtrack.

“Okay, maybe that was dramatic, but I remember my past lives.”

I’m wringing my hands together and Talia brings hers to rest on my shoulders. She gives a little squeeze. It’s how her mom used to calm her down when she was little. She sits back and looks at me.

“What do you mean when you say you remember? How do you know it’s real?” She doesn’t believe me.

“It’s like when you remember something from when you were a kid. It isn’t there and then it is. You just know.” I take a shaky breath. “I looked into it a little while ago, and I found one of the people in the archives of some small-town newspaper.”

“Okay,” she says, nodding. I interlace my fingers and flip my hands upside down in my lap to keep them from fidgeting. I’m holding my breath waiting for her next question.

She doesn’t say anything for what feels like minutes. She’s chewing on her cheek. “Do you believe me?”

“Honestly, dude, I don’t know. But it’s really messing with you, and that’s the part I care about.” Neither of us says anything for a minute. I can’t look at her.

“So,” Talia ends up saying, “what are we going to do about it?”

∙•◊•∙

My parents knew I was afraid of the water the first time they brought me to the beach as a toddler. When I turned twelve and barricaded myself in my room at the

potential of going on a family cruise, they thought they had an overly angsty preteen. At twenty, I knew that at least one of my past lives ended in the depths of the ocean.

I knew because I remembered them.

The first memory came right around my eleventh birthday. I’d finished a standardized test early, and having finished the singular book I was allowed to stow underneath my chair, stared out the window watching the third graders at recess. I couldn’t tell you what occupied my mind in the moments leading up to it, but I saw a boy standing in the middle of the soccer field, searching dejectedly for his friends among the running bodies. Out of nowhere, I had a vivid memory of being lost at sea.

I sat alone, clutching the edge of a bright orange life raft and watching an orange speck floating farther and farther away. The bottom of the raft was strewn with water bottles, food, and the contents of the emergency packet I’d torn apart while looking for paddles (which I’d subsequently dropped into the water during my panicked paddling). I didn’t remember how I got there, just the immediate isolation and fear of being utterly alone.

I got home from school that day and stomped straight upstairs to my room. I shut the door and pulled my diary out of the box of winter clothes under my bed. I wrote about that memory all afternoon. In my eleven-year-old vocabulary, the only word I could come up with was “flashback,” but it never sat right. The memory never played out in my head. All of the information came tumbling in at once, as if it had always been there. ∙•◊•∙

“Come on, Sydney! We’re going to cool off in the water,” Talia and our friend Emma plead as they stand up and brush the sand off their legs.

“I’m good, really. Go ahead,” I reply, looking down and burying my feet.

“Will you at least come stand at the edge? I don’t want to ditch you,” Talia says. Emma’s already halfway to the water. I sigh. The thought of entering that abyss causes my entire body to tense up. I don’t understand how people use ocean sounds to help them fall asleep. Rather than calm me, the crashing waves feel like a warning, a constant reminder of the tide creeping closer. If I get too near the water that inches toward my feet, its rhythmic taunt sends my brain in a million different directions, most of them involving suffocating darkness or giant squid.

“As long as it promises to respect the fact that there have to be two feet of sand between us at all times.”

“I’ll pass the message along.” Talia grins and grabs my hand, guiding me towards the last bits of sand by the water. She’s wearing a floral bikini she bought for today’s trip. It’s dangerous to set her loose in a store after payday; she probably spent more than half of it on the suit. The closer we get, the slower I walk. She gives my hand a reassuring squeeze.

Eventually we arrive, and I plant my feet a safe distance away. The wet sand shows clear footprints, and I crave the unsteady shapelessness of it at our blanket, dry and decidedly unthreatening. Talia looks at me, giving me one more chance to keep walking before she wades in, yelping at the sudden chill as she catches up with Emma. The two of them thrive in the water.

The farther out they get, the less I feel like a friend on a trip and more like a mom watching my kids play. Why did I even come? Why did Emma even invite me? I know it’s her birthday, and I’m trying not to kill the mood, but I’m not sure I’m doing very well. I want to like the beach, want to enjoy being pummeled by waves and coexisting with crabs, but it feels impossible.

I cross my arms. I’m not brave enough to overcome it. I’m not even brave enough to tell anyone about the memories. I wave at Talia and Emma and hike back up the

beach. Best-case scenario, they get hungry soon and we leave to get food. If not, I came prepared with a 400-page book. I walk back in the opposite direction of our blankets, making a pit stop at the car to grab a second water bottle. I people-watch on the way back, my eyes scanning the masses, hopping from group to group every few seconds. I settle on the water as I get closer, making sure I can still pick out Talia and Emma’s figures.

I reach the end of the boardwalk and take my shoes off, breaking eye contact with the water for only a moment as I bend down. The sandals dangle in my fingers as I look up and see the yellow flag flapping in the wind. There’s supposed to be a storm tomorrow; people have been flocking to the water to take advantage of the huge waves it’s causing. The edges of the flag are fraying, and someone has wrapped an American flag bumper sticker on the pole.

“Here’s your gear, dude. It’s all checked and ready. Knock yourself out,” the other man on the boat says as he points to where my scuba gear sits. I suit up in silence, inspecting the weathered American flag sticker on the wall of the boat. I dive enough that we’ve settled into a comfortable routine, and I’m pretty sure the insane day I had doubled my blood pressure, so I’m not really in the mood for small talk.

I get in the water and descend without much thought, my mind clearing the deeper I go. I hit almost thirty feet down and stop for a moment, letting the colors of the ocean life wash a sense of calm over me. The pollution has gotten worse over the last few years, but this is a relatively clean area. I’m glad for it—I don’t need another thing to depress me today.

Everything is normal for the first few minutes. Then suddenly, I lose the flow of air and can’t breathe. I try a few times, but nothing works. My tank has enough air in it, but it’s not reaching me. A brief panic waves through me, but I keep my head; this isn’t my first dive and I know what to do. Silt probably just got inside the machine. I reach

for my backup airflow but run into the same issue, which is quickly becoming a fullblown emergency.

The air in my body is running out faster than normal as my fear increases. It’s dangerous to ascend without breathing, but if I don’t, then I’ll definitely die. I pull on the line to signal that I’m in trouble. I’m fully panicking, and I’m not sure if I can make it back up.

At this point, I only have one choice. I begin my ascent.

∙•◊•∙

I spend the last half hour of the flight pressed against the wall of the plane, waiting for the first moments where the city lights reach us in the sky. It’s the first flight I’ve ever been on; I spent the first hour after takeoff doing the same thing until we’d been above the clouds for a while, and not even I could be interested in the nothingness out the window.

As soon as the view begins to take shape again, I close the last inch of space between me and the window as if the distance had been standing in the way of me and an unobstructed view. From there, the skeleton begins to take shape, and I have my first glimpses of the city at night. It’s incredible. I’ve done enough hiking that I’m used to being above civilization, but this is on a different scale. It feels like floating in the middle of the ocean and being able to see for miles in every direction.

I lean against the railing on a huge wooden ship. My clothes are making me claustrophobic. The corset is the source of the issue; it’s cinched alarmingly tight. The collar of the pale blue dress comes all the way up my neck. I feel like I don’t have room to exist.

The wind blows hard enough that I have to hold on to the side of the ship. I notice I have a death grip on the railing, but I refuse to go back down below. Another memory

hits me: the smell, the crowded bodies, the lack of sleep. I barely have room to stand, let alone think down there.

The sky had filled with clouds earlier in the morning, but they’d gotten progressively more menacing as the day progressed. They’re a subdued gray where we sail, but from my perch, I can see black ones closer than I’m comfortable with. The waves grow as the clouds surrounding us darken, jostling us around and making it abundantly clear that we’re just a tiny boat on a big ocean.

I’m one of the last stubborn people still out on the deck, the last of us holding out as long as we can before we have to go back down below. Descending into the belly of the ship feels too much like walking down into the ocean itself. At least up here, I can see the sky, however dark it gets. ∙•◊•∙

Talia comes around to my side of the car and links her arm through mine. She decided after we talked that I need to face my fear, which is why we’re at the beach again. Even if it means being able to just sit on the beach comfortably, she says I might be reading too much into the whole “death and destruction in the ocean” thing. I find it a little ironic that the girl who spends six days a week telling me to listen to my body is spending her seventh telling me it’s overreacting. At least she’s here with me.

It’s a rainy day and uncharacteristically cold for the season, so we park next to the boardwalk. I leave my shoes in the car.

When I step off the wooden planks, my toes scrunch up reflexively, recoiling from the tiny grains of ground-up rock swarming onto the tops of my feet. Breathe, I tell myself. Normally the sand doesn’t bother me this much. I think my body knows what I’m about to do and is sending out panic signals as early as possible, trying to outlast whatever fleeting convictions I have that this is a good idea.

We walk towards the water. Talia’s next to me, more of a supportive presence tha anything. I need to do this for myself. My feet sink with each step as if the sand is grasping at my legs, trying to hold me in place and stop my march forward.

The tide is far out, and I stop when I cross over the line where the sand changes, and I can see where the water used to reach. Talia matches my movements.

“You still okay?” she asks. “Oh, you know, just admiring the view,” I respond, my voice full of sarcasm I don’t feel.

I inch my way forward until I’m close enough that when the next wave comes in, icy cold water pours over my feet. I tense up. Talia goes to reach out her hand but hesitates, and I don’t close the distance. Half of me is still terrified, but the other half isn’t oblivious to the fact that every few seconds I’m touching the water, and nothing bad is happening. The two battle with each other.

Either the calmer side wins, or I convince myself that the worst part is over because I start walking farther in, staring straight down at the water in front of me. It’s spotted with foamy bubbles along the surface. It’s strange to experience the ocean outside of a memory; I feel like I’m entering another world. My body is still tense and my brain is running a loop of every past life I remember, but I’m doing it. Talia makes to follow me, but when I don’t stop, she hangs back. I make it up to my knees and keep going, ignoring the fact that it’s chilly outside and I’m in my clothes. Now that I’ve done it, I have to see how far I can go.

As the water reaches my waist, it feels like it’s tugging at me, urging me to keep going. I turn around.

“Do you see this? I’m freaking out, but do you see this?” I shout to Talia. I let the tug of the water guide me out farther, taking steps backward.

“I’m so proud of you!” she calls back.

Suddenly, the tug gets stronger, and I lose my balance, plunging beneath the surface. When I come up again, I’m in too deep to stand. I start kicking, trying to get back to where I was, but I can’t. Talia starts running toward me.

“It’s a rip current!” she shouts. I can’t swim. I go under again with the same dread I feel in my memories.