Ouroboros

I died. Countless times I’ve died, only to be reborn again. So many times, I’ve died, so many times I’ve been reborn, so many lives I’ve seen and been. My deaths are so numerous I can no longer remember most of them. In fact, I’m not sure why am I able to remember any of them. Reincarnation is a fact of life, death, and rebirth it would appear. There is a kink in the cosmic system It seems. Or perhaps there was.

The first time I still remember dying I was driving somewhere in the middle of the night. It’s all so blurry now. I must’ve fallen asleep at the wheel because everything turned black for a hot second before shining twin lights shook me out of my slumber. Becoming increasingly brighter and closer. There was no time to think anything, no time to react, no time for any emotion to form.

Bright lights

Intense pain in every single cell of my body.

Crushed

Torn

Screaming

Darkness

Falling down a tunnel of endless darkness. Cold and alone.

Waking up from a nightmare. My death.

I woke up next to a woman I didn’t know. She was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. Memories that weren’t my own slowly flooded my mind as I sat up and stared at who turned out to be my brand-new wife I never remembered having. We had three kids together. I had a decent income. My life was good, even though it wasn’t my own. I felt alien in my new body for a while, but the feeling eventually subsided. This reincarnation was pleasant. I had gotten to live long and healthy. Death eventually came. This time, it felt awful. The scariest thing I’ve ever experienced.

An old man, aged ninety-six. A terrible fire raged inside my chest, choking the air from within my lungs and tearing apart my heart. I grasped my chest. Fear, solid fear, ran in my veins as the pain got worse and worse, taking over everything. The dread in my system only made things worse.

Eventually heart stoppage.

Pain is sharply gone.

Everything disappeared with the pain.

Falling down a tunnel of endless darkness. Cold and alone.

Waking up from a nightmare. My death.

Again.

Woke up on a space shuttle, somewhere in the middle of cosmic nothing. Foreign memories flooding the mind again, blooming like shining toxic flowers in my mind. Countless deaths and countless lives overriding the neural system. An epileptic fit triggered by the intense stress and the onset of a solar flare nearby that flickered mercilessly in front of me. A gradual disappearance of self.

Falling down a tunnel of endless darkness. Cold and alone.

Waking up from a nightmare. My death.

Mortified by the nightmare of being a glistening god in a glistening heavenly chariot, I awoke as a child of the step. A member of the Barlas, relatives, and friends of the great Khan. I rode side by side with the great khan across the endless steppes. Conquering the world in his name, spreading his message to the sinful masses who’ve betrayed their own gods.

Forever haunted by memories and faces of people and beings I could not comprehend. A beautiful woman, blue-eyed and fair, followed me in my mind throughout my long and illustrious life as a steppe nomad.

I succumbed to the common flu. I was old and weak. The fever burned through me like fire burns through dry grass.

One moment I was burning and the next I was in the dark.

Falling down a tunnel of endless darkness. Cold and alone.

Waking up from a nightmare. My death.

Countless more lives and deaths came, too many to count, too many to remember. The memories always followed. The dread intensified to the point of becoming its own being inside of me in a certain lifetime, perhaps previous to this.

A parasite that ate away at me from birth.

There was a constant fear of everything, of the self, of the delusions and visions in my mind.

It was short.

A mere twenty-seven at the age of death.

Cause: Suicide.

Tormented by visions of that fair blue-eyed woman, confessions of love and expression of anger overcome. Hallmarks of a relationship. Memories that are too distant and too foreign to make sense. Taken for delusion and causing endless and immeasurable fear.

A pull of the trigger and a sharp pain in the jaw.

Fear is gone.

Falling down a tunnel of endless darkness. Cold and alone.

The rest is a blur until my current life.

I woke up behind the wheel, driving a truck. It was night, there was rain. I was exhausted. Something felt wrong, something I couldn’t put my mind to it. There were all these strange memories and thoughts. Voices, faces, places.

The date on my phone said December Twenty-first, Twenty twenty-one.

Bright lights looked up.

A car was right in front of me.

Tried to pull the brakes, but couldn’t make it in time.

A loud crash.

Pain from impact, bleeding, and dazed.

Alive, still alive.

Stumbled out of the truck.

An obliterated private in front of me, three bodies torn into shreds. Broken bones and shattered organs all over the vehicle. Static noise ringing in my ears. Terrible stomach ache.

Dread and collapse.

Sudden darkness.

Perpetual.

Voices breaking through the darkness.

Lights… Bright lights…

In an ambulance, heading towards a hospital, concussed, broken orbital bone.

Can’t feel a thing.

Memories that are not my own flooding the mind, memories from previous lives I’ve seen and ended.

A beautiful, fair woman sits beside me, tears in her blue eyes as she holds my hand. Tears of mixed joy and pain. Her presence is identical to the one from my memories, yet different. She silences the memories in my mind.

The cycle appears to be broken. The memories no longer haunt me. They’re there, but I have to bring them up to remember, and with each passing day; I remember less and less.

Less and less…

Sometimes I am afraid that I might forget too much…

Sometimes it all fades too fast.

Waking up in the middle of the night, confused and covered in a cold sweat; not remembering why I even woke up.

Yet there is one constant. My guardian angel is always beside me.

Thanks to my blue-eyed angel, my love, I am free from the endless cycle of death and rebirth.