He manages to find her in most of his lives. And he still loves her enough to fleetingly consider killing her, so that they can start over again, same age, nearer locations, maybe. Wouldn’t have to waste his life searching.

He runs his bulbous, gnarled fingers through reams of white and wiry beard. She’s thirty. It could never work, even if she remembered him. Least, not for very long. The doctors were currently propping him up with a dozen pills and a pacemaker — and still it wasn’t enough, still he was dying. Silver lining though: in previous lives, he’d have been dead a decade ago and would have left without finding her.

He’s sitting in a beat-up Dodge outsider her house; the Dodge has seen most of North America, its rear carpeted with sandwhich containers, bottles, cigarette packets, state maps swirled by red ink — possible locations where she might have been. He can usually narrow her down a little from what he knows: she’d want a job where she sees to a lot of people, always hated silence; will live just outside a city but never in, never suburbs. This only works in America and Europe so the times she starts elsewhere he rarely finds her.

There’s an old frayed teddy at the bottom of the passenger seat. Not that it’s the one her mother had given her as a child, the one that meant so much to her heart, but it’s similar. Once, a few lifetimes back, he found her and showed up with the teddy in his hands as if it was a bouquet of flowers, or perhaps a magical amulet that he’d hoped could bring back her memories. She’d just looked at him like he was odd. Had refused to accept it and closed the door.

Couldn’t blame her.

He sees her now in his rear mirror, walking hand in hand with two little girls, the orange sun above streaking through clouds like tinfoil. His heart does the same thing it always does, regardless of the medication trying to keep it calm. It squeezes, like there’s a fist in his chest clenching.

He hauls himself out the car and leans on it, watches them tread through yesterday’s snow, hears the meltwater slurp beneath their boots. He imagines lifting one of the girls on his shoulders, laughing, his beard brown again, his lungs cancer free.

It could be his life. It almost was, once. Not that they’d had kids, but they would have, they’d talked about it. Back then, boys were the golden ticket, but he’d have been just as happy either way.

Three years they’d been together before he was sent off on a boat to a war he knew nothing about, half the world away.

She’d thought he’d died. God, everyone must have thought it. He’d been imprisoned for a decade and when he’d returned, when his stopwatch began to tick again, he realised it was lagging badly behind everyone else’s.

She’d remarried and had children and he only had one arm and couldn’t compete nor provide so he didn’t stick around long after. He’d thought the pain of that discovery — of her moving forward and him stuck in time — far worse than the ten years in a cell; at least then he’d been able to strike up a fire on a kindling of memories and hopes and keep himself warm.

Then, after death: the soup kitchen. The hand of god, he’d thought, feeding his broken lips, nurturing and revitalising. But now he knows it was the devil’s hand moving the spoon to his mouth.

They’re opposite him now, on the other side of the road. One girl jumps in a puddle and giggles and their mother chastises her, albeit gently, for splashing them, and he knows she’s a good mother. He’s always known. The other girl sees him and stares. He wants to speak to her mother, to tell her a hundred lifetimes worth of tales. To tell her he still loves her after all of them, and will continue to after a hundred more.

But as always, he does not. The bear was as close as he ever got.

He holds up a calloused hand and the girl looking at him smiles in return.

He doesn’t stay to watch them walk into their drive. It’s cold out and he‘s coughing and he should really keep his next appointment — he doesn‘t like starting over and remembering that he remembers.

He takes a last look at the family then tucks away the memory, notes how happy they look. It’s memories like this that somehow make him feel a little warmer next time around, although he doesn’t quite understand why.