“We Met Before We Were Born”

By Riya Yadav

They were never supposed to meet again — yet the universe has a memory far longer than time.

Ira and Aarav are strangers in this life: she’s an artist who paints memories that don’t belong to her, and he’s a historian obsessed with the feeling that something in his past is missing. Their paths cross on a rainy afternoon inside an old bookstore, when Aarav picks up a book that Ira dreamt about the night before — one she had written a century ago, in another name, another life.

From that moment, the world begins to stir. The clock of destiny starts to rewind. Ira begins to dream vividly — not of imagined lives, but of real ones she’s lived before: Bombay in 1927. Paris in 1941. A desert village in 1799. Each time, she meets the same man — Aarav — and each time, she loses him to death, war, or time.

But this time, the pattern feels different. Aarav starts having flashes too — of her face in candlelight, her voice whispering his name in a collapsing temple, her hand reaching for his in the rain. He can’t explain why he remembers a goodbye that hasn’t yet happened.

As they fall in love again, the veil between timelines thins. But Ira soon discovers the cruel truth: this is their final lifetime. Their souls have circled the earth too many times — this is their last chance to either break the cycle or fade from existence forever.

When Aarav’s memories return, so do all his deaths. His mind begins to fracture beneath the weight of countless lives. To save him, Ira must choose — to keep his memory intact and lose him to madness, or to let him forget her and live in peace.

In the end, she whispers to him as he sleeps:

“If love has an ending, then let it be this — that I remember for both of us.”

He wakes to an empty bed, a note that reads:

We met before we were born.

Years later, in a museum, Aarav stands before one of Ira’s paintings — the same image he once dreamed of centuries ago. He doesn’t know who painted it, or why tears blur his eyes. But somewhere deep inside, a voice he doesn’t remember whispers,

“Found you.”

 Theme:

Some souls don’t meet by chance — they meet by memory. Even if time forgets them, love never does.

Chapter 1 — The Rain That Remembered

The rain began softly that evening — not as thunder or storm, but as a memory falling from the sky.

Ira liked that kind of rain. The kind that didn’t demand to be heard, only felt. She sat by the window of “Chapter Eleven,” a crumbling bookstore tucked between two modern cafés, sketching strangers who came in to escape the drizzle. Her coffee had gone cold hours ago, but she didn’t mind. The sound of turning pages was enough warmth for her.

She was halfway through sketching the outline of a man reaching for a book when she froze.

That hand. That curve of the wrist. The small scar near the thumb — a half-moon.

Her pencil fell. The man turned.

He looked ordinary — a charcoal umbrella, damp hair clinging to his forehead, a dark blue shirt that matched the rain. But when he looked up, the air in the room shifted.

Not because he was beautiful. But because he felt familiar.

He smiled — a soft, puzzled smile, the kind people give when they think they recognize you but can’t remember from where.

“Sorry,” he said, holding up a book. “Do you know if this author has any other works? The name sounds familiar, but I can’t place it.”

She blinked at the title. The Hour Between Lives. Author: Mira Dev.

Her heart skipped. Mira Dev — the name she used to dream about. The name she had written on the corner of a letter in a language no one spoke anymore.

“I… I’m not sure,” she said softly. “It’s an old one.”

He nodded, brushing a drop of rain from the cover. “It’s strange. I’ve been looking for this book for years, but I didn’t even know that until I saw it.”

Something in his voice — calm, warm, slightly weary — made her feel as if she’d heard it whispered in the dark, centuries ago.

Find me again.

The words rose uninvited in her mind.

He smiled again, awkwardly, as if sensing her stillness. “Sorry. I talk too much when I find something I love. I’m Aarav.”

She hesitated, then smiled back. “Ira.”

A pause — long enough for the rain to fill the silence between them. Then he said, almost absently, “I’ve met someone named Ira before.”

She felt her breath catch. “When?”

He frowned slightly, looking at the rain-streaked window. “I… don’t know. Maybe in a dream.”

The air trembled — as if time itself was holding its breath.

Outside, thunder rolled across the sky, and a flash of light revealed the reflection of the two of them in the bookstore window — blurred by rain, faces turned toward each other, caught in a moment that felt rehearsed by lifetimes.

“Maybe it’s déjà vu,” he said, laughing softly. “Maybe,” she whispered. “Or maybe it’s remembering.”

He tilted his head. “Remembering what?”

She looked at him — really looked — and for a heartbeat, she saw him differently. In flickering flashes — a soldier in 1941, a poet under a desert moon, a stranger on a train in another century.

She blinked. He was just Aarav again.

“Nothing,” she said, smiling faintly. “Just… an old story.”

He nodded, unaware that somewhere deep within him, a name had begun to stir — a name that didn’t belong to this life.

As he turned to pay for the book, Ira opened her sketchbook. There he was — already drawn. She hadn’t even realized she’d been sketching him all along.

Outside, the rain fell harder, tapping against the glass like fingers on time’s window — as if the sky itself was whispering,

Again.

Chapter 2 — Lives Remembered

The dreams began that night.

They weren’t loud or violent. They arrived like whispers — soft, heavy with fog, the kind that cling to your skin when you wake.

In the first dream, Ira stood at a railway platform that didn’t exist anymore. The sign said Bombay Central, 1927. Smoke coiled in the air. Steam hissed against the tracks. A gramophone played a faint, crackling tune — the same melody Aarav had hummed absently in the bookstore that afternoon.

She saw herself — or someone wearing her face — in a sari the color of dusk, holding a letter pressed to her chest. Across the platform stood a man in a beige trench coat. His hair was slicked back, his eyes the same quiet storm. Aarav.

He waved, smiling that same soft, hesitant smile. The train roared. She tried to run toward him — but her feet wouldn’t move. The platform crumbled into smoke, and all she heard before waking was his voice through the steam:

“Find me again.”

Ira woke with her heart pounding, her pillow damp from rain that wasn’t rain.

The next night, the dream changed.

Now it was Paris, 1941. Sirens echoed. The sky burned red. She was running down a cobblestone street, clutching a notebook to her chest. Pages fluttered behind her like white birds.

At the end of the alley stood the same man — older this time, in a soldier’s uniform, dirt on his face, a cut across his brow. His eyes — always those eyes — found hers through the chaos.

“Don’t stop,” he shouted. “If they find you, you’ll forget.”

Before she could answer, a blast of light tore through the air. She woke again, gasping, her fingers clenched around nothing.

The notebook from the dream didn’t exist — and yet, when she turned on her lamp, her palms were smudged with ink.

In the days that followed, she started noticing strange details. A birthmark on her wrist that looked like the crescent scar on Aarav’s thumb. The way he laughed — a sound that made her throat tighten with nostalgia. A street musician outside her window playing a tune she knew she had danced to barefoot, lifetimes ago.

She tried to tell herself it was coincidence. But when she met Aarav again — because she had to — the universe refused to stay silent.

He was sitting at the same bookstore café, reading The Hour Between Lives. He looked up when she walked in, eyes wide with that same quiet recognition.

“Ira,” he said, smiling slowly. “I was just thinking about you.”

“Really?” she asked, voice trembling slightly.

He nodded. “I had the strangest dream. I was on a train. You were there.”

Her heart nearly stopped. “What happened?”

He frowned, searching for the memory. “I think you were leaving. I tried to reach you, but… you were gone. I woke up with your name in my mouth.”

She looked down at her coffee, hands shaking. “Maybe it was just a dream.”

He tilted his head. “Maybe. But it felt like something older than dreaming.”

Outside, the rain began again — soft, remembering.

And in that fragile silence between two raindrops, Ira realized the truth she had always known:

She had loved this man across centuries. And fate had made them strangers again.

“Some souls don’t fall in love — they simply return home.”

Chapter 3 — The Unraveling

The dreams no longer waited for sleep.

They came in flashes — between blinks, between breaths, between one heartbeat and the next.

Aarav would be sitting in his study, reading a page from an old diary, when suddenly the ink would shift, the words bending into a language he somehow knew but couldn’t name. His hands would tremble. For a split second, he’d see another hand — not his own — younger, stained with soot and blood, holding a pen that wrote with urgency:

Find her before the stars forget us.

Then it would vanish.

He told himself it was exhaustion. Overwork. Too much caffeine. But when he looked in the mirror that night, he didn’t see one reflection — he saw many. Faces flickering over his like candle flames: a soldier, a poet, a sailor, a painter, all with the same eyes. His eyes.

He stumbled back, gasping. The mirror cracked down the middle — a clean, silent fracture.

Meanwhile, Ira had begun painting without knowing what her hands were doing.

Canvas after canvas bloomed in her studio — deserts, temples, storms, faces half-forgotten but impossibly familiar. One evening, she finished a portrait that made her chest ache. A man in a beige coat, standing on a fog-covered platform.

She didn’t need to sign it. The brush had moved on its own, and at the bottom of the painting, in elegant, looping handwriting, the signature appeared: Aarav Malhotra — 1927.

Her blood ran cold.

When they met again, the air around them shimmered with something ancient — a tension too heavy for two people who had only just met.

He looked at her, eyes weary but kind. “Something’s wrong with me,” he whispered.

Her throat tightened. “You too?”

He nodded, swallowing hard. “I see things that never happened. Places I’ve never been. But when I look at you… everything feels like déjà vu.”

She exhaled shakily. “I think we’re remembering.”

“Remembering what?”

“The lives we’ve already lived.”

Aarav tried to laugh, but his voice cracked. “That’s not possible.”

Ira looked straight into his eyes. “Then why do you already know how I take my coffee? Why did you hum that song I dreamt of? Why do you say my name like it’s a prayer you’ve repeated too many times?”

The rain outside thundered like applause from unseen worlds.

He didn’t answer. Instead, he reached for her hand — and as their fingers touched, the café dissolved.

For a heartbeat, they were elsewhere.

A battlefield. A candlelit attic. A stormy sea. Dozens of scenes flickering through them like film reels on fire.

Everywhere, they were together — running, laughing, dying, returning.

And just before reality snapped back, a whisper passed between their souls:

This is the last time.

Aarav gasped and pulled away, trembling. “What was that?”

Ira stared at her hands, which still glowed faintly, like starlight caught in skin. “The truth,” she whispered. “We’ve done this before. Too many times. And every time, we lose each other.”

“Then how do we stop it?”

She looked at him — eyes wet, voice breaking. “By doing something we never dared to before.”

“What’s that?”

She took a shaky breath. “Letting go.”

Love that refuses to die must someday learn how to rest.

Chapter 4 — The Last Lifetime

The air had begun to hum.

Every clock ticked slightly offbeat, every shadow flickered a half-second late. Time itself was thinning — fraying at the edges like old silk. Ira could feel it in her bones, the pull of something ancient and inevitable.

She stopped painting. She stopped eating. She spent her nights sitting by the window, sketching circles that never closed.

And then one dawn, as the first light crawled across her room, she saw it — the mark on her wrist that had always been faint was now glowing, pulsing like a heartbeat. It wasn’t a birthmark. It was a seal.

A seal that meant the circle was ending.

When she found Aarav again, he was standing on the bridge where they had first walked together weeks ago. He looked like he hadn’t slept. The wind tugged at his coat, and his eyes — those same eyes through centuries — were red from trying to hold too much memory.

He didn’t turn when she approached. “I remember everything,” he said softly. “Every death. Every promise. Every time I found you too late.”

“Aarav…”

“I saw us in 1799,” he went on, his voice breaking. “You were a dancer. I was a soldier. You died in my arms during the siege. I saw us in 1941. You burned your poems so no one would find me. I saw you in Bombay — waiting at a platform I never reached. Every time, we lose each other.”

She wanted to reach for him, but the air between them shimmered — like heat, or the edge of a dream.

“Ira,” he whispered, “what if remembering is the curse?”

She blinked away tears. “Then forgetting would be mercy.”

He looked up, eyes glassy, desperate. “I don’t want mercy. I want you.”

She stepped closer, the world trembling around them. “You already have me. Across every lifetime, in every name, in every goodbye.”

Then she cupped his face in her hands. “But if we stay — if we hold on — the universe will collapse under our love. It’s not meant to remember us anymore.”

He closed his eyes, a single tear tracing down. “Then what do we do?”

Her lips trembled. “We let go before time does.”

That night, they lay side by side on the floor of her studio, surrounded by all her paintings — all their lives staring down at them from the walls. The moonlight pooled like milk on the canvases.

She whispered, “When the morning comes, you’ll wake up and forget this. Forget me. You’ll have peace.”

He turned to her, shaking his head. “And you?”

“I’ll remember for both of us.”

He laughed weakly, tears in his eyes. “You always were the braver one.”

They fell asleep holding hands, fingers still intertwined when the dawn broke — but when the light touched them, the universe took a deep breath.

And then it exhaled.

Aarav woke alone.

The studio was empty. The paintings were gone. The only thing left on the floor was a note — old, yellowed, ink bleeding at the edges.

He picked it up. The handwriting was familiar.

We met before we were born. And we will meet again when time forgets to count.

He didn’t understand why his heart broke, or why the rain outside suddenly felt like someone saying goodbye. He folded the note and kept it in his wallet, without knowing why.

Years later, he walked through a museum and stopped before a painting — a woman standing under a moon that was half light, half shadow. The plaque read: “Untitled — by Ira Sen (1935–2024)”

He didn’t know her. But tears blurred his vision, and somewhere deep in his chest, a whisper echoed:

Found you.

“Maybe love isn’t meant to last forever. Maybe it’s meant to teach forever what love feels like.”

We Met Before We Were Born

Epilogue — The Universe Remembers

There is a moment, between one breath and the next, where time forgets to move.

In that stillness, something lingers —the echo of a name whispered across lifetimes, the warmth of a hand once held under starlight.

The universe, vast and ancient, hums softly to itself. It has seen galaxies burn, civilizations crumble, and yet it still remembers two souls who loved each other enough to defy time itself.

Somewhere in that endless expanse, two stars drift a little closer —their light brushing for a heartbeat too long, as if greeting an old friend they once were.

If you listen closely ,you can almost hear it —a faint pulse between the constellations, a memory wrapped in starlight:

“We met before we were born.” “And love remembered.”

The story doesn’t end here, Riya. It rests — the way souls do when they’ve finally learned what they came for.

By Riya Yadav