She could not face it today. The mere act of lifting her eyes to greet her guest was painful. Somehow, it was always worse at times when questions about her future haunted her the most. Funny, since the pain was about the past - a long, long gone past.

She sat on the veranda when he arrived. He said, in French, “Bonjour Ariel, ça va?” Ariel put down her book. She thought she almost heard herself sigh. Eliot was a recent acquaintance. Someone she had liked immediately. The sigh was certainly not directed at him. No. The pain is what made her sigh. The pain of looking in the eyes of the past.

Every time this happened, Ariel wondered if the other person knew. Could they remember as she did? She had encountered so many of them over the past four years or so. It seemed this ability to recognize them had become more acute with time. To Ariel, it was now second nature. She remembered people from eight hundred years ago and she remembered glimpses of her life then, often while looking in their eyes.

Not long ago, she had walked into a store and crossed paths with a woman in full army fatigues. Ariel did not look at her. She did not want to look, because she was not comfortable with the military, with the idea of killing others in their own countries. She had seen so much oppression over the centuries. She avoided the woman’s gaze in order to avoid feeling angry, or sad. The woman spoke to her. It took Ariel by surprise. She had to look up and ask, “Pardon me?” The woman said, kindly, “I like your Celtic pendant, it is very pretty”.

The flashback occurred in that instant. She knew. She knew she had met this woman before, in a village, centuries ago. Ariel travelled a lot in her former existence. They had crossed paths then also. She wanted to ask the woman who now wore twenty-first century military fatigues, “Why? Do you not remember you were a healer then? I remember you walking through your village with a bundle of plants you had just gathered. You are the one who would not look at me then. People do not feel comfortable in the presence of time shifters. Or perhaps it is because I was a man. Why are you not a healer anymore? Why are you wearing these clothes that are not the essence of who you are?”

Eliot’s impact was gentler. More matter-of-fact. Ariel wondered if he knew. She thought that others, like her, had probably come to understand who and what they were. On the other hand, perhaps for some it did not matter. Eliot was different because he had preserved his profession through the ages, in some fashion. He had been a cloth merchant then. Now, in 2009, he was a jeweler. Ariel had so strayed from her original calling, while living in the current century, that she was not certain who she wanted to be anymore. It seemed she did not have to choose before. Perhaps this is what hurt, more than remembering.

To be continued.