Born Again Stalker

TW: Death

Standing at the back of the mourning crowd I listen to the story of her life. She grew up moving all over the country. She travelled the world. Her childhood friends wipe their eyes and sniff. Everyone is wearing black.

            I should be part of the story. I spent years of my life married to Judith. Not this life. I want to push my way through the crowd and hug her sister and her mother. I want to tell them we’ll get through this together.

            They don’t know me.

            I shouldn’t know them.

            I remember an entirely different life.

The first time around, the first life I remember, I was cautious. I took jobs that were easy to find. I worked in a hotel cleaning the rooms. I worked in a supermarket stacking shelves. I didn’t do much with my life until I met her. She’d just returned from a tour of Asia, and she was keen to go back.

            She wore a green dress to our first date. She did all the talking, telling me about how incredible the food was. I listened enraptured by her enthusiasm. I’m not much of a talker so I listened to her stories while she played with her black hair. Her greenish-brown eyes were magnets to mine.

            I talked more on the second date. We had some really bad pizza at a buffet place and ended up getting takeaway from a place she’d found wandering around a city I’d known for years.

            I remember our adventures. She’d smile as she led me out onto hotel balconies that we’d accessed using the emergency stairs. We had a date on someone’s flat roof.

            She was studying for a teaching degree while I stacked shelves. She ended up cancelling the lease on her flat to come and stay with me. We’d watch subtitled foreign films on my bed, still naked from having obnoxiously loud sex.

            She graduated and told me she wanted to teach abroad. She had a job offer in Tokyo. She was going to take it. Did I want to come?

            I was terrified. I wanted to go but everything I knew was in Aberdeen. My best friend who I’d lived with for years. My job. My friends, the few I had.

            I sold almost everything I owned. Endless videos I used to escape my boring life. CDs that I never listened to anyway. I sold the books and donated most of my clothes. I made sure my life fitted into my suitcase and a rucksack. I couldn’t part with my beloved PlayStation four.

            I hugged my best friend goodbye. He got it. Judith was the kind of girl you don’t let go. I got on a plane with my first passport and watched my neck of the woods shrink away. I talked with a Japanese woman who had been sightseeing at Loch Ness.

            I got a job helping in the same business as Judith. It was amazing. I got to teach kids. Seeing them grow, learn. I loved it. What had been a job for a year or two became four or five.

            We got married during the pandemic. Just us. We sent photos to family. Having it low key was good for me. The idea of a wedding stressed me out.

            We had three children. Three beautiful children. Eventually we moved back to Scotland. She kept teaching and I got a job working on trains. We were happy.

            I got sick. Like both of my grandfather’s, cancer found me. She dropped everything to look after me. Judith was the last thing I saw in this world.

Then I woke up all over again. A baby. At first I couldn’t remember the other life but from the age of about five the memories started to bleed back into my head as I slept. I remembered Japanese that I couldn’t possibly have learned. I knew maths I hadn’t been taught yet.

            I remembered Judith, a woman I’d never met. I loved her.

            She became my obsession. To love someone and not know how to be with them is agonising. I knew bits and pieces of her hectic life story. I tried to track her down. I travelled across the country, running away from home to find her. I sat on a bus for nine hours to get from Edinburgh to London to find Judith.

            She wasn’t there. I’d messed up the years. The house where she’d lived when she was seven was still owned by an old woman in a brown cardigan when she was six. What was a nine-year-old boy going to say to a six-year-old girl anyway?

            “Hi, you don’t know me, but we were married and had three children in my previous life. Can we be friends?” I don’t think so.

            I left it alone for a while.

            I found her again when she went to university. By then I had a completely different life. I’d soaked up Japanese from a previous life’s learning and taken lessons in French as well.

            We went on a date. Not the same date. Things I’d said had changed how we interacted. She met with me three days before she had the first time.

            We went to the takeaway place she’d first introduced me to in another life. She gave me an odd look when I suggested her favourite dish. It was a moronic move. I kept dropping places she’d been into the conversation thinking it would be a talking point.

            She didn’t smile during the entire date. She sent me a text message after telling me that it’s creepy to stalk someone and that there was no other way for me to know about her favourite place to eat, her order and where she’d been.

            I’d screwed up my chance to be with her forever.

She got on with her life. I got into drinking. I travelled and drank. I’ve vomited in more countries than most people can name but I wasn’t truly happy again for years.

            Her name is Mary. She is an English teacher, like Judith, that I met in Vietnam. I’d been teaching there for a few weeks and was ready to move on when she invited me out for food. She spoke French and she’d always wanted to go to Japan.

            We taught in Tokyo for a year then moved on. Mary likes hiking. We’d walk through jungles being mauled by mosquitos and she’d be having the time of her life.

            I found out she was having an affair after two years living in Rome. I went back home to live on my parent’s couch. They were happy that I hadn’t jumped back inside the bottle. I studied teaching for the first time and got a degree four years later.

            The local school only had twenty pupils across all the year groups. I worked there happily for thirty years. I never forgot about Judith. I knew how to find her on Facebook. All I could ever see was a photo. Her in front of the pyramids. Her winking in front of the Eifel tower. Judith in a tall man’s arms. Her greenish brown eyes sparkling as she held up a hand decorated with an engagement ring. Judith with her first baby. Her kids. Judith drinking in one of the bars where I’d taken her all those years and a lifetime ago.

            Judith with a cancer research banner across her profile photo. Judith with a cap on her head, slimmer than I’d ever known her. Judith running a Race for Life. Judith in a hospital bed.

It’s only because I’m a stalker that I found out about the funeral. I stand with people who barely knew her. I realise I didn’t know her. Not this version of her. Her own children, not ours, weep as she’s lowered into the ground. I walk away before anyone can ask how I know her.

            I’ve spent this whole life obsessing over the last one. I haven’t lived at all. Will I get another chance?