“I was around my girlfriend’s house meeting her parents for the first time,” says my friend. “I was maybe only seventeen. Anyway, they serve onion soup to start with, which was great, super strong just how I like it. But two minutes in and I catch them all looking at me — my girlfriend, her older brother, parents — all staring at me.” He shrugs. “I figure they’re looking to see what I think of the soup, and I give them the thumbs up and carry on eating. Later, after the meal, my girlfriend is pretty mad at me. She asks if I tried to ruin the meal on purpose.” My friend pauses here.

”On purpose?’ I ask, providing my minimal part in the conversation. I’ve never been much of a conversationalist but in the last year or so I’ve almost turned mute.

”Turns out I’d been slurping the soup extremely loudly. Every spoonfull of it. Slurrrp. Slurrrp. My girlfriend called my behaviour unbearable. We didn’t see each other much longer after that.“ He smiles and sips his beer.

”So… That’s when the past lives started coming back to you?”

”You got it in one,” he says. “If this was golf you wouldn’t even need to putt. In one of my lives slurping was how I — my community — showed pleasure at the food we were devouring. And the onion soup was really good. It would have been rude not to slurp. At least, in my mind it would have been.”

Me and my old school friend are at a bar sipping half-empty beers. It’s a tacky ocean themed bar with plastic eels and starfish and seahorses dangling from the ceiling, radiating pools of imitation bioluminescense. Blues and purples. The seahorse above our table flickers every so often.

It’s the first time I’ve seen my friend in ten years. He’s handsome but he’s aged more than I expected — his hair still dark but wrinkles and crows feet settling deep into his face like fingers into wet clay.

“Back then,” my friend says, “I didn’t realize it was a past-life thing. It just seemed like I was doing what I was supposed to be doing, you know? Like at some point in my seventeen years someone had told me slurping at dinner with your girlfriend was a good idea. But a year or two after that, I start to remember more details. I remember my life in Japan. I remember my life in France. I get confused with who I am now because of who I was then. It’s all one great big muddle.”

We‘ve finished our beers so I get us another round then sit back beneath the flickering seahorse.

“How do you deal with it?” I ask. “I’ve had one life and thirty years in it. And that’s still too many memories that I don’t need.”

”You don’t deal with it. Or at least, I didn’t. That’s why I went AWOL.”

I frown. “What do you mean?”

”I was in an institute for five years. I couldn’t cope with the memories.“

”Whoa,” I say, unsure what else to say. I’d figured he’d gone travelling. He’d always been adventurous. The kind of kid who wanted to make the most of their one life on the planet. The fact he hadn’t gotten in contact with me during that time hurt a little, but wasn’t entirely unexpected.

“It’s okay,” he says. “Or it is now. But back then, boy. The memories flooded back and drowned me. My life in France ended in the trenches and for a while all I could see at nights were dead friends I’d never even met. How do you deal with that when you’re not even twenty and think of yourself as a pacifist? And that’s not even the worst of it.”

I felt bad. Why hadn’t I bothered to search for him? To check he was okay? Instead, ten years on, it’s my friend who got in contact with me. He saw my profile on some social media channel and wanted to see how I was doing.

”It gets worse than trenches?’ I say.

”Yes. Sort of. I mean, I’ve lost so many parents and children and loved ones that it’d make your head spin. Ah sorry, I shouldn’t mention that — I hope it doesn’t upset you?”

I raise a hand and give a meek smile. “It’s fine. It’s nothing compared to yours.”

“We all have our own demons,” he says. “Squatting on our shoulders. There’s no point comparing them. But okay, look, there’s a reason why most people don’t remember this stuff. It drives you mad to remember it. Forgetting past lives is evolution at work. We remember important bits — stay away from snakes, don’t sleep in a tree in case you fall, don’t eat bright red berries — and we lock away the rest. Except, sometimes, like with me, the hinges on the safe door crack and out it all spills.”

We have another beer and talk about sport instead, then about school.

”Yeah,“ he says, grinning at each and every school anecdote I have. “I forgot all about that. Man, we had some good times.”

Eventually, I ask what’s been on my mind, “How did you do it? How are you like this?“

”What do you mean?”

”You got out of the institute. You seem to be coping fine now. The memories aren’t crushing you.” I grab my sweating pint glass and clasp it on the table between my two hands, like if I let go of it it’ll fall and break. “How did you do it?”

He looks an me earnestly, holds my gaze and thinks a while. “They got me to concentrate on other memories. When I think of my life in France, I think of my childhood with my parents, of art, friends, poetry, gathering grapes from the vines, anything that made me happy there. I forced myself to do this each time memories of that life came into my head — I’d search for the best bits of that life. Then, I’d do it for the next life, and the next, and the next.”

I don’t pick up my glass. It feels too heavy, even thought it’s only half-full now.

“Eventually,” he says, “you learn to turn down the brightness on the worst parts and turn it way up on the good. The bad doesn’t go, but it fades a little into the background. It allows the better times to come into focus.”

”That sounds… difficult.”

”It’s not easy to do,” he says. “It takes time. But past lives do become past, become memories. It’s possible to live in the present again.”