It was during a time of heartache and disappointment that had greatly wrecked my hopes for love, a time in which my own desire had drained from me, leaving me shell-like and hollow, that I found myself more attractive to others than I’d ever been in my life. Within a month, three men made a joke—with a kind of ardent solemnity—that we had been lovers in another life. A friend’s friend who had never noticed me before brought me armfuls of flowers and an artisanal cheese plate. A distinguished and revered older man spoke to another of my allure. I was dressing up, I was wearing lipstick, but in clothes and makeup I’d worn plenty of times before; it was, without a doubt, my unhappiness that drew them. Or, more, my emptiness, the internal vacancy that perhaps made space for them to pour in their own imaginings. It was not wholly unlike the story my mother tells, how after the bandages came off for her nose job, she suddenly became seeable to men, men who had never noticed her before, suddenly approaching her, asking her out, and like her, I resented the attention even as I appreciated, even needed it. Something un-me was being loved, that was for sure, and so I was the vessel but mostly just that, and as I grew stronger, and wept, and regained a sense of myself, as I filled in, acted again on my own desires, the yearnings of these men faded, and I returned to the normal dating balance of liking and rejecting and being liked and being rejected, and no one has ever said the “lovers in another life” quote to me again.