In my mid twenties (in the mid 1990s) I was persuaded by a friend to read a book called Obsessive Love, by Liz Hodgkinson. The author, having experienced the phenomenon of obsessive love herself, offers many ideas on how it arises. The idea that remained with me is that my teacher, ‘Miss Williams’ (as I call her in my published diaries) and I were lovers in our past lives, that I had had a sudden death and so had carried the intensity of our love, grief from the rift, and recognition of my lover, into my current life. Miss Williams, on the other hand, had lived for a long time after my death, she had overcome the love, her grief had subsided, and she no longer recognised me in this life.
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