In Another Lifetime

If I ever believed in soulmates, or fate, or the idea that two people are destined to find each other, I buried that belief twenty years ago, along with everything else I lost that year.

Since then, I've built my life around certainty and routine. 

Boundaries and distance. 

The quiet knowledge that guilt and grief will always be my companions.

But then she walks into my lecture hall, twenty years old, my student, looking at me like she already knows me. 

Like she's been waiting her whole life to find me.

Every instinct tells me to keep my distance.

She's too young. Too outspoken. Too distracting. 

Instead, my eyes linger a little longer. My hands itch to touch what they never should. My excuses to stay away continue to lead me back to her.

It's not just her impossible eyes that undo me. It's the impossible coincidences I can't explain away. 

It's the unsettling feeling that I should know her, too. 

Wanting her could cost us everything-my career, her future, and the little semblance of control I've managed to piece back together.

But walking away from the woman who feels like she's always been mine . . .?

That's the kind of loss I wouldn't survive again.