-Link

There's a theory that before we're born, we have all the knowledge and skills we'll ever have but during birth we forget them all, and during our life we must relearn everything. I don't know if other people felt this way, but I certainly did. Being reincarnated over and over again, it was my entire existence.

I guess there were some perks in being thousands of years old. Things are easy to you when you've done them for so long. If someone told me the reason why I was so good at horseback riding was because I had done it for thousands of years, I'd think they were crazy. I was just good at riding. I didn't think I'd be good at much many other things. I never thought I'd have the patience for fishing, never thought I'd be able to shoot an arrow straight and damn never believed I could even hold a sword upright.

But I could. I could do all those things. I seemed to have become quite good at a bunch of numerous things that I wouldn't have guessed. There was this game where you roll a little ball around a maze, called 'Roll Goal'. It had like a million levels, but apparently I was amazingly good at all of them.

By looking at me, I don't think it was apparent that I was this so called master of all trades. I was pretty good at puzzles and problem solving. I knew how to think, but I must have given off this impression that I was a dip shit. Maybe it was the blond hair. I wondered if my past selves had blond hair. Or maybe it was just something in my face, because I tended to draw in a crowd that liked to pick on the slow, new guy. They didn't mean any harm. It was all in good fun, and eventually when it became apparent that I was a whole lot smarter than I looked, I was their new best friend.

For example there was this one guy that challenged me in this bombchu contest. What he didn't know was that I was a boss at all things explosive related and I beat his ass in a bet. Got twenty rupees and a friend for a life.

One thing, that apparently my past lives have never learned to master, was talking to women. It's probably the most suckiest skill I have. I mean women, not girls. I could handle girls to an extent. Girls were pretty easy to amuse, but I couldn't always keep myself amused with them. Women were interesting, sure, but they always acted like you were out to get them. They have this thing set into their minds that all men want is sex, and that my every intention was to win them over to my bed. I thought about a lot of other things, not that they cared to know. They probably just saw me as a blond dip shit like everyone else did, but the women were not as easily impressed as the men were. In fact, my skills of being generally awesome at everything seemed to piss them off.

Not that it really mattered. I was not a huge ladies man, like everyone seemed to believe. Actually, I'd be happy without any woman in my life. Just a horse and maybe either a dog or a bird would do. They were a whole lot less crazy than any woman. But of course there was that whole problem of making sure my descendants were alive so I could be reborn again and be this country's hero. It put some pressure on me in finding a good wife to have children with. I must have done it before. If I hadn't reproduced in my past lives, I wouldn't have been reincarnated again. Still, you'd think it would be a little easier for me.

Speaking of crazy women, there was one made especially to drive me insane. I think when the Goddesses decided to come up with the whole idea of having a hero, they realized, 'Hey, some guy isn't going to want to do all this shit for eternity. We need some really crazy shit head that'll be willing to do it!" Then they made me and said, "What's the best way to keep him crazy? We don't want him suddenly turning sane and quitting." And then they created Zelda.

Zelda was the worst of them all. I know I probably should be calling her 'Queen Zelda', but it didn't sound right in my mouth. I was so used to calling her 'Princess Zelda' so she's just gonna be Zelda for now. Zelda, like any other crazy woman, had this habit of repeatedly trying to tell me what to do, what not to do, how to do it and how not do something. She was a bit of a control freak. Don't get me wrong, she was cute as all hell. It was just for someone that was probably the most practical person that I knew, her worrying and over reacting to things was so not practical. She once freaked out because one of the guards, (there was about one every half a foot that lined the walls over the entire god damn castle) was missing. She was so sure that someone was trying to sneak in as a guard, that she was riling everyone up to check on identities. The guy was only taking a piss and he forgot to tell someone.

She meant well I know and maybe, sometimes, her overreacting caught something that we all had missed. You never knew.

Zelda was smart. She had to be. She was just as old as me.

It wasn't like Zelda and me remembered every little detail of our past lives, but as time went by, memories came back to us. I didn't remember Zelda when I first met her but I think there must have been something in the back of my mind that did. I wasn't a whole big believer of love at first sight, yet when seeing Zelda for the first time I thought I did believe it. It was probably some vague familiarity about her that I clung to. Zelda reminded me of a home that I never had. I never belonged anywhere, not really. I didn't know my current family, and it turned out I hardly ever did. But when I saw Zelda, I thought I saw my home that didn't exist. All these unexplained feelings sort of translated to infatuation, and all I could really tell at the moment was that I liked what I saw. Didn't help that she was pretty to look at. Just confused me more really. But what was I supposed to do back then? I was just a kid.

As memories came back to me, I knew that we were, and always would be, more than just friends. Some of these memories were very dear to me, and some were filled with a lot of pain and guilt. I tried not to think about my relationship with her in our past lives, because I knew I'd just wind up hurting myself over something that happened life times ago. Though I hated these memories, pushing them in the back of my mind and willing them not to exist, I wished they had come to me sooner. Being a teenager with all my raging hormones, there was a bunch of things I shouldn't have said, shouldn't have done. If I had snipped in the bud, it wouldn't have drag out like this.

If you asked me if I loved her now, and I could have been honest about it, I would have to say yes. But it was something that I didn't want to complicate her life with. Complications were something neither of us needed right now.

Sometimes I liked to just blame it all on her. It was pretty easy. She was the one that kissed me first but I could have easily ignored it as if it didn't happen. I didn't have to push it further like I did.

All that was in the past, and once I died, it would just be another one of those memories in the back my head that I tried to ignore.

One thing about getting resurrected so often is that you grow old faster. As things start to come back to you, you have the baggage of about a hundred other life times. It makes you wiser, sure, but the mind gets old. I guess it was just as well. In my profession, living a long life wasn't an option. My record age so far was thirty seven. I had died in so many gruesome and heroic ways. Many of them were in the history books, about how I sacrificed for some greater good but there are some that I remembered that it didn't quite end like that. I never outright killed myself before, but there were times when I could have avoided death and didn't. I didn't think Zelda knew any of this. Usually by the time I start feeling old, years have gone by since any letters in between us had been sent. I was sure news of my death must have carried to her eventually but I was glad she wasn't around whenever it happened. Though, now that I was twenty eight, my life span expectancy closer than ten years, and me still hanging around, I was a little worried on what may happen.

I didn't know how long Zelda's lives usually lasted. I assumed for a long time. Zelda was way too smart to get herself killed in stupid ways, and without me around stressing her out all the time, she should have been pretty happy.

Yet, for some reason, I was still hanging around, stressing her out.