SB LACROIX

I’ve been looking through my old word doc files and finding things I wrote, saved, and basically forgot about. The piece below: The Heart Remembers: Love and Past Lives is one from what I am now calling: The Forgotten Files. It was written several years ago.   

***~~~***

The Heart Remembers: Love and Past Lives

My teenage son came home from school this afternoon and found me deep in thought, staring at my computer screen.

“Did you have anything to do with the heart-shaped water spot in the driveway?” he asked.

I looked at him. I could feel the look of confusion creeping across my face. 

“What?”

“In the driveway, you know – where the air conditioner drips water. It’s in the shape of a heart. Did you do that?”

The air condition in the master bedroom sits in a window that overlooks the driveway. The water from it drips onto the hot top (that’s what we call it, some might call it black top or asphalt).

In the moments before I replied, I wondered why he thought I might have had something to do with it. Was it because and he thought since it resembled a heart, it must have been designed to appear that way?

“No, I didn’t. Why?”

“Well, because it is in the shape of a heart. The bottom doesn’t come to a sharp point, you know, but it’s still shaped like a heart.”

I’ve seen that air conditioner drip spot many times, and I have never seen it any where near the shape of a heart. It usually just drips into an uneven circular shape.  I thought it odd, and apparently so did my son.

“You should take a picture of it,” he said.

I looked at him. He has dark eyes, much darker than mine, and they are so deep, I dare not speculate the depths to which the boy’s thoughts go. He is highly observant, compassionate, and a bit of a mystery. He’s funny, a bit odd, and an old soul.

He was barely two years of age when he was “helping” his father by handing him tools as my husband worked on his truck. My husband thought it was just luck the child was choosing the correct tools (not knowing the names of each) when my husband would ask our son to hand them to him. It wasn’t until the boy started to anticipate the next tool that his father would need and had it at the ready, did my husband bring him into the house.

There stood my husband looking dumfounded; his hand tightly grasping our son’s little hand.

“So, even if he got lucky picking the right tool when I named it, what are the odds he’d have the next tool I’d need in his hand waiting for me?” my husband asked. “How would he know that?”

My husband doesn’t rattle easy, but suffice it to say the experience made him uneasy. He took the boy’s sweater off and handed it to me.

“Maybe he should stay in here with you for now,” he said, and returned to his project. 

Our son grew to speak of his memories from a past life. He says some are vague, others clearer. He also has dreams of being in an English boarding school. He says he isn’t sure of the year, but the school is old. He remembers the worn wood floors. He said he’s had the dream several times.

Of course, dreams are dreams and memories are memories, but sometimes with past lives, the memories come in dreams.

My memory dream also takes place in England. I would date it late 1800’s to early 1900’s by the style of my dress. I am playing hide and seek with my little boy in a large room, grand in scale and design. There are numerous large, high-backed chairs with elaborate wood carvings and red-velvet cushions. There is a function of sorts going to happen there, but for now, the room is empty of all but me and my little boy. I am in a lovely dress, though I cannot recall the color of it. I am crouched down, hiding behind one of the large chairs, and I can hear my son, perhaps aged three or four, calling out, “Where are you Mummy?” His accent is clearly British. I feel happy in the dream. I am young, perhaps early twenties.

I then hear a man’s voice say, “What are you doing, Darling?” In the dream, I know the man speaking is my husband. I look over and see his shoes at first. I then look up and see his pant legs and his waist. I see his vest and the gold chain of his pocket watch. My eyes follow the buttons of his vest up his chest, and then I wake up. I never see his face. I never see the little boy’s face either. I never see my own face in the dream as my perspective is from being in the body of the young woman.

While it is a dream, like my son’s English boarding school dream, he, like I, have a feeling it’s more than just a dream. My son says he didn’t like the boarding school and he wanted to go home. He says he felt sad. Those were the impressions the dream left him with.

My dream leaves me with the impression I died young, and left behind a child or children, and a man I loved. In my book, Shattered, I wrote poems and pieces of prose inspired by a man I “remembered” but never knew (in this life). When I was a teenager, I used to say that I wanted to be twenty-three forever. As I look back now, I find that odd. What did I know about being twenty-three as a teenager? And now having lived well past that age, I can say with certainty, I would not want to be twenty-three forever. I often wondered why that age had meaning to me. 

My son and I share some other odd occurrences. We were both born silent – no crying and no breathing. We were both whisked away and “worked on” (to get us to breathe) for what was a nerve-racking amount of time for me when my son was born, and also for my mother as she recounted my birth to me. When we finally did draw breath, we did not offer the robust cries our siblings did. We offered whimpers, as if defeated. We are both highly sensitive and introverted. We are both prone to melancholy, over-thinking, and a wistful desire to return to something, someone, or some place. While we were born in different months, he was due on the day of the month I was born, but born on the day of the month my mother was due with me.

Shortly after his birth, I was carrying him to his cradle and I whispered in his little ear, “Thank you for finding me again.” I surprised myself when I said it. I wasn’t sure why I felt that or what possessed me to say it. I just did. He is our fourth child, born nearly nine years after our third. How I knew him in a previous life I am uncertain, but I sensed that I did.

He seems very old for his age. One day he came home from school and caught me playing loud music not suited to his taste. The music was something a young person would play that an older person would find annoying.

He looked at me with disapproval and said sternly, “Turn that shit off.”

At first, I was annoyed by his language and air of disrespect. But then something came over me, and I responded with sarcasm.

“Yes, Dad.”

I then turned the music off and yelled, “Dad’s home, fun’s over!”  

I smirked at him, but he failed to see the humor in any of it, and went to his room without another word.  

“Really – you think I should take a picture of it?” I asked my son, now looking at me funny, probably wondering why I was staring at him.

“Yeah, I do.”

I grabbed my camera and he followed me down to the driveway. I looked at the drip spot. Sure enough, it was just as he described it. I photographed it. (I posted it at the end of this piece.)

I don’t believe in coincidences. I don’t believe the universe is random. I believe such occurrences are synchronicities. That shape had significance. My son noticed it and mentioned it to me, going as far as to question if I had anything to do with creating the shape; and, he wanted me to photograph it. 

I loaded the photos up onto my computer. I adjusted the brightness and removed the color. I asked myself what I thought about it. I asked myself what it brought to mind. I asked myself what it had to do with my son.

“You should take a picture of it.” His words rang in my head.

A heart shape (love) – a photo (remembrance) – what did it evoke?

I opened a word file and put my fingers to the keyboard. I began to type. A few lines in the title came to me. 

To some, it is nothing more than a simple water mark from a dripping air conditioner that took on a heart shape, but to me it is inspiration. To me, it says look deeper and see something you may not have noticed otherwise. Perhaps there is something you need to know, remember, or realize. Perhaps there is something you need to understand. 

A heart shaped symbol has a universal meaning: Love; and that is the one thing I know, without doubt, endures through countless lifetimes.