Reincarnation

The Story of Reincarnation

1. I am born

I live in a small hut with grass walls and a grass roof and a dirt floor. It is warm all the time. We eat mostly fruits we pick from nearby trees. It is warm. Some fruit is ripening all the time. For the sake of variety of food, and because they can, the men hunt. We have meat maybe six times a month.

Everyone here smiles at least once every day.

Everyone loves to play with babies. People come to my basket and touch me all the time. Their touch is soft and sweet.

One day when I am ten, a bug bites me. In six days, I am dead.

#

2. I am born

I live in a huge white house overlooking a blue ocean. Outside, the sun is very bright. Inside, it is much less bright. Cool breezes blow draperies all the time.

There is a nurse. She is gentle and kind, but she rarely smiles. She keeps me clean, but she rarely plays with me. When she does, she looks worried.

When I am twelve, I am married to a large man with a beard. I do not live with him until after I menstruate. Then I go to his house in a procession.

I live in his house. I am instructed how to pleasure him. He does not visit me for six months, until I have learned what I am being taught. My teacher is a young woman. She knows … a lot. Once he has visited me, I never see her again.

He visits me regularly. Soon, I am pregnant. I throw up every morning. Food tastes weird. My belly grows. My back hurts.

I give birth in the middle of the night, in a howling thunderstorm.

In the morning, I hold my son. He is the oddest looking human I have ever seen, and the most beautiful. I hold him all day. Then, they take him from me.

I bear nine children. Each is unique from birth. Each is astonishing. I know each one the instant I see them. But I am never allowed to hold them enough.

When I am eighty-nine, I die after a moment of intense pain.

#

3. I am born

I am alone in a room not much bigger than I am. There are tubes in my nose and my arm and up my ass. I am attended constantly by several people wearing masks and gloves and other stuff. They are outside my room. They lift up my roof and handle me very gently, then put me down again.

Eventually, I learn, my room is in another room, which is in a building called a hospital. I learn all this years later.

I have come to this hospital nine or eleven times. I am five years old.

On my twelfth birthday, I am told I will not have to go back to the hospital again. I am cured, they say. And actually, I feel better than I have ever felt.

I feel my life is a gift. I am thankful every second, through happiness and agony, things I could not feel if I weren’t alive.

When I am seventeen, I meet a boy who adores me.

When I am twenty-one, I meet a man who adores me. We marry when I am twenty-three.

I have two children. They are utterly normal.

I live an utterly normal life,

My children grow up. They triumph, are defeated, learn from mistakes, explore. They travel. They teach me much more than I ever thought I could learn.

My husband dies. Two years later, I die, Slowly, the life drains out of me, and I float away.

#

4. I am born

I am alone in the eternal fluid. It is warm and dark.

Suddenly, the sky rips open. Two hands reach down and haul me out of the warmth into a cold room filled with blinding light. I scream, something I must do but have never known could be done..

I explore. This world extends from my skin to the farthest reaches of everything. It is continuous, and includes everything, and changes all the time. I can never see it all, never see enough.

I leave for the big city, first chance I get.

I am confident. I take big strides. Take on greater and ever more intricate tasks.. Conquer enormous challenges. Overcome gigantic obstacles.

Something isn’t right. My body is fine. My senses are keen. My brain feels … I dunno.

I seem to be falling.

I waken on a pile of leaves. “Are you all right?” some guy is saying.

I am afraid. So very afraid. I don’t want anyone to see me.

I am broken. Somehow, I must be fixed.

No one will fix me. I cannot be fixed.. I am not a mechanism.

I must heal.

Slowly, I begin to live.