She was born in 1917. Forty-Nine days after the death of some unknown young man on the fields of Verdun. It was a textbook case of reincarnation, but she was born in some sleepy mid-western town, to parents barely conscious of what was going on in France. To people with little thought of Buddhism or mysticism.
She couldn't understand her dreams at first. She got the same feeling of horror or joy that other children her age got from dreams, but none of the people she dreamt of spoke to her in English until she turned nine years old, or thereabouts. When she was 11 she dreamt that she was talking to a boy in her class, she understood everything, and woke up feeling she had lost something irretrievable.
In high school she learned French. Unusually quickly. She was intelligent and managed to be sent to get in to a Northeastern school. She hated he home town, and her parents. Men told her she hated beautifully. Though the term always made her upset.
She lived in France for a few years shortly after graduation. She was surprised to find that she could walk the streets of Montpelier without asking for directions. She would occasionally recognize shop keepers and call them by their first names. She left angrily though in 1939. Her trip had been cut short.
She was in love with an American boy. She had met him in France, and he escaped back to the US with her. That didn't save him for long though. He was drafted by early 1942. She was angry that he left her. Their love wasn't a happy kind of love. She treated him with a sort of fixation, like he was proof of a logical argument. His existence proved to her a subject that made her tremble. Though it was not something she could ever articulate.
He survived the war, but still died before her. Around 1987. She died three years later.
When she was older, she would tell her grandchildren stories about a young man in Montpelier around the turn of the century. She would describe the city in great detail, and tell stories about every friend, marriage, describing conversations as though they had just happened. The children listened attentively, but afterward always found the stories rather pointless.
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