First, went to Newport, R.I. for officer candidate school, fit, trim with full martial ardor...upon arriving I felt melancholy, cried at sunsets and fainted when crossing the Easton's Beach bridge...fully back to normal when I left eight weeks later.
Second, two weeks after leaving Newport and on August 19th, I met "M" with a stunning and mutual instant affection and familiarity. We were deeply involved in days and engaged in a couple months. Odd/cool psychic connections too, but immaturity and distance broke us up in 10 months.
Third, within six months of the above breakup I met someone with nearly the same feeling of familiarity and affection as M, although somehow calmer. We were married on August 19th two years after I met M above.
Fourth, seventeen years passed and I was dozing on a train in Italy when I was awakened by my name being shouted. When my eyes adjusted I was looking at a lifesized vision of M and my head was filled with memories and emotions long forgotten. The vision faded and left my mind whirling and the smell of M's favorite perfume on my jacket for the rest of the day.
Item Fourth spurred my investigation into everything we discuss here...I sought to understand what the vision was and why I got it.
Fifth, I found over time that M had been my sister in a previous lifetime in which we were born to a wealthy family and she and I were in a car accident in which I was killed as a young man in the northeastern US.
Sixth, I happened to pull down from the shelf a book I bought years before and had yet to open. As I thumbed through it I noted the familiar manner of speech and colloquial word usage by the last private owner of the Hope Diamond, kind of a cocky, funny attitude just like M, who commented that she was not worried about the "curse" because she was cursed before she bought it...her brother had died in a car accident in Newport, R.I. on August 19th while crossing the bridge at Easton's Beach!
In short, I went to Newport and got faint near the spot of my earlier death. Two weeks after leaving Newport I met my former sister on the anniversary of my death, August 19th. Two years later I married another woman on August 19th (who, from another thread of circumstances turns out to be my and M's mother from that earlier lifetime!). Then on a train in Italy, M comes forward to redirect me into thinking about first her, then me, then my relationship to all I hold dear. I then found a book which nearly jumped off the shelf and identified the parties involved in that earlier lifetime.
So, these threads of serendipity are slowly and surely weaving an understanding of the tapestry of my soul's sojourn on earth...and others are picking up where that one left off...what a wonderful game!