Reborn Souls

Chapter Three

“Dad, can I ask you something?” I said one afternoon.

He looked up from what he was doing. “Of course.”

“Before I was born, did you ever have a dream about Grandma?”

His expression changed. He became quiet in a way I had noticed whenever I asked about the dream.

“Why are you asking?”

“I just want to know what happened.”

He looked away for a moment before answering. “Your grandmother appeared to me in a dream. She told me she would come back again.”

“Come back? What did she mean?”

“I don’t know how to explain it, Cecelia.”

“But you told me that I was born after that dream.”

He nodded slowly. “Not long after it, you were conceived and born.”

My parents had been married for eight years before I arrived. My mother once told me that the waiting had become so painful that they eventually stopped talking about it and simply carried on with their lives, hoping their prayers would one day be answered.

There was another detail I had never thought much about: the white mark on my wrist. It had been there since birth, shaped almost like a delicate symbol. Sometimes it looked like a pale patch on my skin; at other angles, it resembled a tiny map.

“Do you think this mark means anything?” I once asked Mum.

She glanced at my wrist. “It’s a birthmark, darling. You’ve had it since you were born.”

I accepted that answer. I wanted to be normal. I didn’t want to be the girl who dreamed about places she had never visited or seemed to know things before anyone told her.

The dreams had started when I was a child. At first, they were ordinary enough: unfamiliar places, strange people, and scenes I could barely remember after waking. Eventually, they became so common that I stopped paying attention.

I was quiet and reserved by nature. I preferred observing people to joining every conversation. I noticed things others often missed—the hesitation before someone answered, the way a smile changed when someone was pretending to be happy, or the difference between a genuine laugh and a forced one.

I loved nature, too. Plants, flowers, the sun, the moon, and the stars could keep me occupied for hours.

“Why do you spend so much time staring at leaves?” my brothers sometimes asked.

“Because you don’t pay enough attention to them,” I would reply.

They usually laughed and left me alone.

There were other things I kept to myself. Before my mother gave birth to my younger brothers, I dreamed about them. I saw their faces and somehow knew they were coming.

“How could you have known?” Mum asked when I eventually told her.

“I don’t know,” I admitted. “I just dreamed about them.”

Sometimes I dreamed about something and it happened days or weeks later. At other times, I woke up with the answer to a problem I had been struggling with. I rarely spoke about these experiences because I knew people didn’t always understand what they couldn’t explain.

But the questions never disappeared.

Why did some places feel familiar when I had never been there? Why did certain dreams feel less like dreams and more like memories? Why did everything seem clearer around two in the morning?

I had spent years telling myself I was simply Cecelia: a girl who loved nature, preferred quiet, and had unusually sharp senses.

Then the dreams changed.

The forest appeared more clearly. The villagers began calling me by another name. And a man with a familiar face kept looking into my eyes and calling me Monica.

That was when I began to wonder whether I had spent my whole life trying to forget something I had never truly forgotten.

By Thursday afternoon, I had watered my plants after college, as I always did. Then my phone rang. My younger brothers were waiting for me to pick them up from school.

I changed quickly, grabbed my keys, and drove to the school. They had football practice every Thursday, so I parked near the gate and waited.

As I watched the students move across the compound, my thoughts returned to the man in my dreams.

I had started seeing him when I turned nineteen. Five years of the same face. Five years of waking with the strange feeling that I had lost someone I had never known in real life.

My relationships had never lasted more than six months. At first, I enjoyed the messages, the company, and the excitement. Then one morning I would wake up and feel nothing, as though the attachment had vanished.

“Maybe I’m afraid of commitment,” I had told myself.

“Maybe you haven’t met the right person,” a friend once suggested.

But neither explanation felt complete. There was a void inside me, and nobody I dated seemed able to fill it. Every time I slept, I returned to him. Whenever he appeared, some missing part of me seemed to become whole.

I hated admitting that I felt attached to someone I had never met.

After football practice, I drove my brothers home. Once they were safely inside, I headed to the state library.

“I need answers,” I muttered as I entered.

I went straight to the history section and searched through books on ancient cultures, folklore, mythology, spiritual traditions, and reincarnation. I didn’t know exactly what I wanted, only that I needed something to make sense of my life.

One title caught my eye: “The Tales of Punarnava”

“Punarnava,” I whispered, running my fingers over its worn cover. The word reminded me of renewal, beginning again, and returning.

I sat down and opened the book. Its stories spoke of ancient people, forgotten traditions, death, rebirth, love, and souls returning in different forms. Every few pages, I stopped because something felt uncomfortably familiar.

“Why does this feel like a memory?” I whispered.

Hours passed before I finally closed the book. Outside the library window, evening was settling over the city.

I thought about the man again his face, his voice, and the way he called me by a name that wasn’t mine.

“Who is Monica?” I asked myself. “And who is he?”

For twenty-four years, I had tried to live an ordinary life. Perhaps I had been trying too hard.

What if I stopped running from the dreams? What if I allowed myself to experience them instead of dismissing them as nightmares?

I looked down at the book, my heart beating faster.

“I want to know who Monica is,” I whispered. “I want to know who that man is and why he keeps finding me.”

I had lived twenty-four years as Cecelia. Maybe it was time to discover the part of myself I had never known.

I closed the book and made my decision. I would stop fighting the dreams. I would follow them wherever they led me and meet him again.