“There is a word in Korean – inyeon (인연). It’s an in-yeon if two strangers even walk past each other in the street and their clothes accidentally brush because it means there must have been something between them in their past lives.”
That one day when we celebrated your birthday, we did your routine to calm your mind – walking along the shores, staring into the horizon. I was actually on a brink to end whatever we have at that time, but I didn’t have the gut to do it. I liked you from the first time we met (in fact I liked you so much it was embarrassing), but my fears got in the way.
Somewhere along our walk, we saw a psychic tent and I joked we should do a reading just for fun. I was skeptical, you were skeptical, but we did it anyway for the fun of it. At first the psychics said they thought we were lovers for a long time – we were not, we were barely a thing back then. Then they said perhaps it’s because they see that we were connected in the past lives.
We laughed it off back then, but upon hearing the reading, I was so fascinated on how do the psychics know that? Look, I was skeptical, but somehow the reading reassured my decision to face my fears. Looking back now, their words perhaps could be true.
We have this little game of ours, sitting in cafes or restaurants, and guessing the relationship between strangers — “who do you think they are to each other?”. Is the couple in the back is on their first date, is the couple sitting in silence is on their third anniversary? Will they stay until marriage, or are they in a brink to end the relationship, or are they not even in a relationship at all?
The answer would be endless. But to think of the inyeon concept, for them to sit on a table together, they must be connected in a few lifetimes before this. Or perhaps, this is the first lifetime they met, and they will surely reconnect in the another.
Similarly with us, the possibility of our paths crossed together is between the endless of possibilities that could happen otherwise. The possibility of you not noticing me is millions, if not endless — but you were given the slim possibility that you noticed me out of all people, and you took it. For me, to be brave and face my fears to start a relationship is also the choice I made out of millions of choices I could’ve taken. It’s quite funny that it took a psychic reading for me to made up my decision, I am also thankful for the one out of millions possibilities that we did a reading together.
These odds that we’ve taken and shaped our relationship until now made so much sense of the psychics’ words — that we were connected in the previous lifetime. Us, a two complete polar opposite, from the surface looks like having no chance to be deeply connected, somehow matched instantly. It was weirdly easy enough for us to talk every day after few days of knowing each other, it was effortless for us to get to know each other, and somehow all the dots just connected instantly.
If we were connected in the previous life, I’d like to believe in all the lifetimes that we met, we brought the remains of the relationships into the next lives. Like there was an invisible string, tying us together through all these times, and when the time was due, we were given the chance to relive what we had. That way, it would be easy for us to resurrect the connections whenever we walk past each other later.
If we were connected in the previous life, or even hundreds of previous lives before, then who do you think we were in the past lives? Were we just a short fling with no real meaning of the relationship? Was I your first love that got away when you were 18? Was I the one who hurt you badly? But since our stories are not over, were we fated to meet again in this lifetime?
On the concept of inyeon, two souls will be tied forever after they have been through eight thousand encounters over eight thousand lifetimes. I wonder will this be our eight thousandth encounters? Or this is just another lifetime before we reach the eight thousandth?
Whether this lifetime is our second, or our eight thousandth, I want to stay with you in this, and to find you in our next lives.
Will you stay through another lifetime?
