Familiar Strangers

I am a big reader. I read everything — it’s disastrous. My mother loves to say that when I was little, my reading habits baffled my late father. A three-year-old flipping through the newspaper? He’d look at me like, does she even know what she’s reading? Soon enough, he found out. I began reading the Bible out loud to them.

I do not recommend this. They rewarded my performance by assuming I was ready for school. And that, my friends, is how I found myself on this arduous, never-ending journey of lifelong learning.

So, if you’re a three-year-old reading this (please don’t), do not read these words aloud. It is a trap.

Of the many books I’ve devoured this year, a few lingered in my mind long after I’d closed them. For this post, I want to talk about The Midnight Library by Matt Haig, and Who’s Loving You by Sareeta Domingo. Both circle around the idea of reincarnation — the tantalising possibility of living multiple versions of your life.

Now, let me be clear: I am not entirely sold on reincarnation. My spiritual beliefs don’t quite stretch that far.

But — and here is where the hopeless romantic in me emerges (or the idle lady in a coffee shop near you) — I do think about what it would mean.

Imagine this: you’re sitting in a restaurant, you glance up, and your eyes meet those of a stranger across the room. You share a knowing smile. It feels rehearsed, familiar, almost comfortable. Naturally, because the world has made you cautious, you grab your bag and leave, wondering what that was.

Now imagine that, in another life, you were married to that stranger — that you earned the coveted “till death do us part” badge together. And in yet another life, you divorced because they had an affair. And in another, you drank like a fish and they left you.

If reincarnation were real, it wouldn’t only apply to love. It would apply to enmity too.

How many times have you heard someone say, “I don’t like Mark. We don’t gel. I don’t know what it is — my spirit just doesn’t like him”?

Perhaps Mark and you — lovely you, the hero of this story — have never liked each other in any of your lives.

Maybe in the Zinjanthropus era, Mark stole your two stones — the only possessions you owned. You couldn’t start a fire. You didn’t eat for two days. Being skinny didn’t even help because everyone was hairy, and Mark wasn’t called Mark — he was called Zamunda.

In another life, you were a King and Mark led an army to overthrow you. You ended up exiled from the very city you built. This would explain why you and Mark now have consistent wars over the printing and coffee machines — why you eye each other like adversaries who know each other’s capabilities, waiting for one wrong move to escalate the conflict.Of course, in that case, both you and Mark have fallen greatly — from kingdom wars to printing wars — really?

Or maybe reincarnation is that feeling you get when you walk into a place you’ve never been, yet feel — tangibly — that it isn’t your first time there. I felt this when I first visited Nigeria. I blended in so effortlessly it was as though I had picked up a life I’d paused. The food tasted both new and familiar, and the energy of the people felt like déjà vu in motion.

And then there are places where I’ve felt the opposite — where my skin crawled with loneliness and I stuck out like an unfortunate thumb. I’ve imagined strangers staring because I wore my “difference” in my gait. Looking back… maybe they weren’t staring at all. Perhaps I simply wasn’t meant to be there.

Now imagine that feeling is a residue of some past-life tragedy. Maybe that place is where your marriage collapsed, or where illness found you, or where you lost everything. Maybe that chill down your spine is a warning that your story has never turned out well on that soil.

It’s a fascinating idea, reincarnation — comforting, even. It lets us believe that we are drawn to the familiar because good fortune awaits us, and repelled by others because past hurt lingers.

But if you’re not careful, you could build an entire belief system around it — and rob yourself of living fully.

It would be a terrible misuse of my time, your eyes, and whatever device you’re reading this on to attempt a full deconstruction of reincarnation. This article is simply about what-ifs — for readers who enjoy a little dreamy distraction.

But let me remind you: your life is factual, not mythical.

So take a chance and invite Mark for coffee. After a day of corporate grammar and heated printer warfare, he might turn out to be a surprisingly likeable oddball over one beer. Surely, you can forgive him for the stones he stole somewhere back in evolution?

Take a chance on that unfamiliar place, too. Maybe you only disliked it because you arrived during winter. That might have been hypothermia talking — not tragedy from another life.

In any case, we will never truly know, because we only know what we know.

And honestly, you shouldn’t take advice from strangers on the internet — especially ones who reflect on supernatural concepts for as many words as I have here.

Live.