Bathroom Monologue: Work the Curse

An audio edition of "Work the Curse" is available. To listen, click the triangle. To download the MP3, click this text.

I thought about it while you were sleeping. You can’t remember our first life? I can’t either. All these lives we’ve led are a haze. We keep being reborn, falling in love, and remembering everything too late to save each other. They say he’s trapped us in tragedy. They say we’re always murdered in front of each other, but I don’t remember. Do you?

We’ve died in sorrow hundreds times, and we’ll do it thousands more. We’ve never been able to break the curse – but now, I think we can beat it. I watched you sleep last night, and remembered you dozing on my shoulder in a dozen other lifetimes. I couldn’t help but touch your hair and think: part of this is the best thing that could ever happen to me. Meeting you a hundred more times? If we love for a year each life, we’ll outlast every marriage in history. And when I die? I know I'll see you again. I don't want you to suffer, but the end comes to everyone. If not in this Great War, then in sickness or old age.

He wants us to dread this. In that monster’s mind this was going to be eternal heartbreak, but this is an eternity of chances. We'll live again, and again. From this life on, we'll remember each other, but like any good couple, we'll remember selectively. In five lifetimes we'll concentrate on remembering the reunions. In ten we'll remember all the worlds we've shared. In twenty we'll hunt down the lineages of the families we started, see our great grandchildren's work, and fill our souls with it. With every lifetime we'll repeat that we only die together, not how. Not murder. Not horror. In thirty, or fifty, or eighty lifetimes, we'll only have a vague idea that each life is going to end. In a hundred lifetimes we’ll only remember this as a miracle that keeps bringing us back together. Maybe we can't break the curse, but if we live each time without fear of what's coming, it can't win.