by Aisha Urooj
"I miss her."
"I know you do Cassie. Try to think about her in her happier days. She would want you to be happy too."
John would comfort me during my grief and also helps me to forgive myself for Ellie's death. I fall in love with John again.
How could I not?
Maybe I was never out of love to begin with and had been waiting for him as well. In all the years since, no other person had come close to my heart and soul like John had.
If Ellie were alive today she would say, "I knew he would come back for you, all you needed was to believe in love Cassie. I am so happy....it is all so romantic!"
∞∞∞
Chapter Forty-One: Adieu, My Dear Friend
Life goes on after Ellie's death. The world didn't stop or slow down after she was gone...though to me it felt that it did. She had appeared suddenly in my life all those years ago and even more quickly she had gone from it. People tell me to move on, but how could I, without it feeling like a betrayal to Ellie?
Without realizing it, I have begun to fear living. My heart remained rooted to one spot, I didn't want to make new memories as I feared that I might forget what went before it.
I remember the tattoo that she had gotten, an infinity symbol wrapped around a heart made of thorns and roses. How ironic was the infinity symbol! The body that had gotten it inked was only mortal after all and now laid buried under the earth. She had said that life was made of both thorns and roses. I wished I had plucked away the thorns from her life, so that it would have simply left a row of roses for her.
I became a writer by profession and writing becomes my catharsis. I write and write my thoughts on paper, often holding back my grief as I don't get to share this experience with Ellie. I didn't get to be a writer while she had lived. I want to write about how she had been, to capture her nuances and immortalize it for the world. Ellie as her sweet, funny and loving self.
∞∞∞
My only connection to her are my dreams and memories, when I dream about her, it is then that I see her most vividly. Ellie looks like her old self, healthy, happy and warm, a spectre of what she had been in life.
"You are going?", I say sadly.
She smiles. "You know that I am already gone."
"What if I need you?"
"Oh Cassie, my pineapple, you won't. Remember my braids? Remember how you opened my braids because you didn't like them being tied up. My time here is done, don't tie me to this world any longer Cassie."
I do remember and my own words echo in my mind from my distant past: "I want you to be free", says a young Cassie from my memory.
But I don't want her to go. My heart selfishly wants her to stay. "Please stay Ellie, don't leave me."
"Cassie...I need you to start living again."
"Living again? I am breathing aren't I?"
"Living is more than just breathing. Think about all the happy memories we shared together..."
"Happy? Ellie...how will I be even ok without you?"
"Cassie, my love, as long as you can think of one happy thought and smile, you will be ok. Life passes in the blink of an eye...it did for me. Cherish it while you are living, love yourself and those around you, open your heart and fear life no longer. Farewell, my friend. Farewell. Don't mourn my death, celebrate my life and yours. Our friendship made mine beautiful."
I wake up from my dream to find the sun shining golden and bright. She was gone. Ellie was gone.
I try to remember her words as she lived. "Love laughs eternal", I say sadly.
∞∞∞
Chapter Forty-Two: Purgatory
I guess this is the part of the story where I should say, 'I smile at the memories and I live my life for love. I do it for her'...but this is not how it will go.
Why do Ellie's memories somehow seem more real to me than my present reality? The past is entrenched in my heart, soul and mind. It is entrenched in my every breath, it is there in every heart beat, it is entrenched in every fibre of my being.
I have a lot to be grateful for in my life but sometimes some things, some moments and some people leave such a mark on your life, that life begins to be defined by the moment before and the moment after their arrival.
I am stuck in that eternal prison and can't seem to get out of it.
On the anniversary of Ellie's death, many years later I decided to get the same tattoo as hers in her memory. The image of the heart of thorns and roses and the infinity symbol has haunted my dreams in the years since Ellie's death.
What it means to me I cannot say, I just know what it meant to Ellie. At least I can say that it will link me back to that happy moment when all was well.
I return back from the tattoo parlor, feeling the dull throbbing in my arm. I take an painkiller and get ready to fall asleep. I look at the tattoo as I drift off to sleep, wondering if it will still haunt my dreams tonight.
Silence and darkness. I do not have a single dream, nightmare or vision.
Perhaps finally I have been cured.
As I wake, I hear a familiar sound calling my name.
"Cassie! Cassie! Come see my tattoo!"
It's Ellie! My mind jolts and I wonder if I was too quick to think that my nightmares had gone away.
"....Ellie?"
"Yes Cassie...who else would it be?"
I rub my eyes to see Ellie still standing there beaming at me. She brings forward her arm for me to see the identical tattoo as the one I got peering at me.
I look to my arm and mine is still there. If this is not a dream, it feels too real.
"Ellie...you are alive?"
"Yes Cassie, I feel so alive!"
"No I mean that you are breathing.."
"I know right! I should have gotten this tattoo ages ago. I finally feel like I am in my skin and this is what was missing."
"But you were dead Ellie?"
Ellie looks at me puzzled. "Did you have a nightmare Cassie? You don't look so good. No worries, I am here and brought you some world famous croissants that will cheer you up and cure all."
She rushes to set up a table and I can't stop staring at her alive again. So what happened? I remember getting the tattoo and thinking that Ellie was dead...but nothing else seems as clear anymore...perhaps it was really a nightmare.
"Ellie I thought I lost you forever."
"Whoa there Cassie, have you been going through my movie scripts and rehearsing my lines? Leave the melodramatic parts to me ok."
I still don't understand what was going on, the only thing that confirmed what I knew to be true was the tattoo on my arm. Other than that, the life that I woke up to was the life that was in my past.
I try to explain this to Ellie.
"So you are trying to tell me that I died in the future and that you never got over the grief, despite finding John....and me haunting you in your dreams telling you incessively and repeatedly to just let me go and move on?"
"Pretty much...yeah."
"That is a little crazy Cassie."
"But it is true, look at my tattoo!"
"I don't see anything Cassie.."
"It's right there, how can you not see it?!"
"Maybe you have not been eating enough and had a nightmare? You shouldn't worry Cassie. I am here, nothing happened to me."
"But you died of drug overdose. If the present now is real, I can't lose you again!"
"Cassie you know I never took drugs in my life, remember the campaign I started in High School? The one that said: 'I don't take candies from strangers'."
I start to remember and I believe that she was telling the truth. Perhaps life gave both of us a do-over. I could not bear the guilt of not being there for her during her drug addiction. Perhaps this Cassie was different from the one I knew.
∞∞∞
Things were the same in many way with Cassie but it some ways it wasn't. It was true that this Cassie didn't do drugs. I puzzled over the pieces from the past life and the current.
It was like there were
different jigsaw puzzles but all of them completed the same final picture. I made some of the same old memories with Cassie, going over conversations that I had gone over before...but once in a while, I would make a new memory with her.
"Let us do a search for John!"
"What do you mean?"
"Let us search for him on social media. I can tip my fans and they can do the sleuthing for us! I have the best fans..."
Strange. This is not how I met John in -what I call now- my other reality. I look at her puzzled, which Ellie being Ellie, took as a sign of confirmation.
Her devoted fans managed to find John within a week and Ellie set us up with a meeting, the three of us. It is what I had dreamed when she had passed away before I had reunited with John in my other reality. Now we all got to be together again.
John meets us and we fall in love again. Ellie is ecstatic and already starts to dream up a wedding for the two of us. Years past and the moment finally arrives when the two of us decide to marry. Ellie is thrilled to be my maid -of-honor and wants to be the wedding planner too.
I see her as she prattles away at her dream wedding plan for John and I. It is so good to see her happy and in my life again. Many times I feel the other reality was just a mirage...that is until I see my arm amd the tattoo inked there permanently.
Ellie has settled on a destination wedding for us and I simply agree with whatever John and Ellie decide to do. Since she will be shooting for a pivotal scene for a movie around the same period, she will arrive on a flight earlier than us. She will take over the wedding arrangement before our wedding day and leave the next morning soon after the ceremony.
I sigh, relieved at my change in fate and as I do many times, glance over my forearm to see that this time the tattoo, along with the nightmares of the past, had also disappeared.
What I took to be a sign of good fortune, the disappearance of the tattoo, would however stand to mean something else entirely. Days before my wedding, as Ellie was set to arrive at our wedding destination before us, her plane crashed into the ocean.
187 passengers were onboard at that plane, including Ellie, and there were no survivors.
No. This can't be happening again.
My new life turned to a new nightmare. My life became dark, just like before, but this time with new regrets that I didn't have before or could have imagined. Ellie never got to be in our wedding in this life.
She reunited John and I, unlike in the other reality, where we were reunited after her death but cruelly she was gone again before we said our I dos.
Was I destined to this grief?
Years past again as I grieve her death and like before, the past starts to haunt my dream again.
What did it mean seeing those dreams again from a lifetime ago?
Final Chapter: Eternally Bound
This time I dream about thorns and roses. I am in
a forest clearing with a maze in the centre formed of rose bushes. I am lost and there is thick mist everywhere. I see an infinity symbol light up in the path ahead. As I reach for it, I hear a familiar voice again.
"Cassie! You would never guess who I found today!"
Just like before, I would rush to see if the voice was a vision but Ellie was really there, holding a small puppy in her arms, looking suspiciously like mini Buddy.
"It's a puppy! The sweetest creature I ever came across in my life. He just started to follow me on my walk and when I called him, 'Hey little buddy, what are you doing here?' he jumped into my arms!"
"You are here Ellie?"
"Yeah I forgot to call but isn't this pup so cute! He doesn't have a collar or is chipped...I will put up missing posters everywhere, just in case. But can we keep him if no one shows up?"
I nod, still too stunned to say anything.
"Yay! Can you hold him while I take a picture for the missing poster signs? Smile!"
∞∞∞
In death or in life, or if I were given a choice to go to Heaven or Hell, I would go to where I could see Ellie again. For the memories and moments with her and everything that is good that comes with her friendship, I would choose to be eternally bound to her. And this is exactly what I chose.
I found that each time after Ellie's death in another lifetime, I would start to get the nightmares again. Following the heart of roses and thorns and the infinity symbol, I would be offered a choice to be with Ellie or to simply move on with my life without her. Every time I chose Ellie and I would wake to find her alive again, as if nothing had changed and we would go through life as best friends would.
In each reality, every time that her life is unexpectedly cut short, my pain is unbearable, and her death cleaves my heart in two again.
It seems that I held the golden thread of fate in my hand and it would be my choice to create another short life with Ellie or keep living with the grief to my own final days.
When John had said in my first life when I was sixteen, that I had an old soul, he was not right then but he would be right now. I have lived a thousand lifetimes. His words prophesized my destiny in a way he nor I could not have imagined.
It might seem like madness but I am happy with the memories that I get to make with Ellie in each lifetime. In each life, she is the one who links me back to John and Buddy and all that I love. My mind floods with memories of Ellie, of her during our childhood, of us as teenagers, of us struggling to be adults, of her in every moment since, both of us happy and laughing together.
I would continue this for an eternity or until when the fates decide to give up on our tragic destiny, finally letting us live our lives fully as it could be.
Our love and friendship will truly be eternal, my dear Ellie. I will never give up hope.
∞∞∞