Just one life

Standing here on this roof I realize I have always known that my body wasn’t my own, that I was living someone else’s life. I was always aware of the fact that I shouldn’t be here on this earth. I tried everything to escape this endless cycle of rebirth but every time I died, I came back as someone new. And I remembered everything, all my past lives, especially my first one. I am aware of the fact that I’m only a consciousness being stuck to the human race. But I don’t want this. I don’t want to live on forever, hunting different bodies, living a thousand lives. I want to find paradise, a place in the sky where I can finally have my peace. I’ve tried everything and it seems, this time I might have hit the right spot.

Standing here on this roof I realize that this is it. It’s the end for my current body but only the beginning for my souls ascend into peace. Suddenly I’m being taken on a journey of all my past lives. And it starts with Cassius.

The place I was born first was a plain cottage, no larger than a playhouse. My dad was a carver and my mom a weaver. We were a happy little family. My dad with his dark beard and strong arms could carry the world on his shoulders and my mom with that fierce look in her eyes was sure to protect me from any danger. I never really understood how such strong people could give birth to a frail boy like me. I hated the work my father did. Granted, he did beautiful wood pieces who could impress even the king, but I wasn’t fond of his plain job. I wanted to become something big, a doctor, or a poet maybe. I wanted to invent something, to find the cure to some disease. But even from the beginning, life had other plans for me. When I was 25 I had about enough with taking care of the sheep and feeding the pigs. I wanted out. I had some money saved up and I was planning to leave. The world was so much bigger than just this piece of terrain and this wooden cottage. I wanted to see what was out there. Just then, a woman came to our door out of nowhere. When my mom opened the door the strange woman collapsed in her arms. As always mom knew first hand what she had to do. She didn’t even hesitate before stretching the woman on her bed and running to the kitchen to bring her some water and soup. However, she only woke up after two days.

It turned out she wasn’t even a woman, just a girl of 16 who ran away from home. Her name was Livia, a name I would never forget. My parents took pity on her so they let her stay, help mom take care of the house. At night I and she would get together and talk. It was nice to have someone whom I could set my thoughts free to. I could never tell my parents about my plans, I knew they would be disappointed. But it was so easy to talk to Livia. She understood me and didn’t think less of me because I wasn’t happy with my life. She told me about her journey and how many wonderful villages she passed until she got here. She planned to reach the mountains of Scandinavia. And she wanted me to come with her. I would have left right then and there but my mom got sick and I couldn’t leave just yet. And slowly I started to let go of my dream of seeing the world. My parents were getting old and I was needed here.

The only thing Livia told me about herself was how alone she felt and how all this time she was searching for someone to understand her. I could feel her growing attached to me. I never found out why she left home but on the morning of April 15th, I could tell that she wasn’t running from people who wanted to harm her, but from people who wanted to keep her from harming others.

As I was saying, I woke up on the morning of April 15th to the chirping of birds, only to find my parents in a puddle of blood, Livia standing between them. She didn’t even try to hide the fact that she killed them. Her motive? She wanted me to be free. And according to her, now there was nothing keeping me here so she and I could go wherever we wanted. I had seen death before when my mom cut the pigs for Christmas. But this, seeing the big mass of blood and crossed limbs, my parent's faces distorted, the evil witch standing in the middle of it all, everything was excruciatingly painful. Even so, I didn’t cry. I think the shock was just too big. So I closed my eyes and I screamed. I screamed and I screamed until my scream became only a deaf sound. And when I opened my eyes everything exploded.

I woke up 10 years later as Sarah. I led a normal life as her at first, playing with dolls and having tea parties with my friends. But then a visit to my aunt's farm made me remember who I was. I still had the mentality of a 10-year-old so I didn’t grasp the full extent of the situation. I thought all these memories that were flying in where just dreams I had. Then, as I got more mature with age, I could visualize everything clearer. I was able to remember everything about my past self and so my life became a living hell. I couldn’t concentrate on my current life anymore, I was living in the past. I never told anyone of this. In those times they would consider me possessed by the devil and would have locked me up somewhere in a dungeon. So I took matters in my own hands and tried to take my life. My suicide attempt failed however but on April 15th the next year, I had a fortunate accident and died.

The more bodies I changed, the faster the memories would come to me. I could remember what all my lives have been like but the knowledge I accumulated overtime didn’t transcend as my soul did. I had to learn everything a hundred times and then forget everything again as I was starting a new life. I could only remember actions and most of all feelings. And that feeling of dread and anger from my first life never left me. Soon I realized a pattern, I was only dying on the 15th of April but weirdly enough I was reborn on different days. So that left me wondering what my soul was doing in the time I wasn’t possessing another body. Was I floating through the galaxy? Or staying buried six feet underground?

I led so many different lives, some good, others bad. I wasn’t always human, sometimes I was an animal or an insect. Those lives were especially weird because I had all these visions of my past but no way to understand any of it. The only thing that never changed, was that every year on the 15th of April, I was expecting to die. Sometimes, when I was born in a family where my dad was beating me and my mom to death, I couldn’t wait for that date to come so I could commit suicide, other times, knowing I couldn’t die, I would fight back at the people who did me and my loved ones wrong. It depended on my personality at that time. Because with every new body came a different personality, a different set of aptitudes, fears, and emotions

See, even though my soul was the same, even though I could remember all that happened in my past, I was a different person every time. But being different people who all have the same past was scary. How could I enjoy the present and focus on what was to come if I was constantly reminded of the mistakes I did in the past. You would think I’ve learned from my mistakes. But human life is so various, I met different challenges every time.

Once I was an Indian woman forced to kill to provide for her children, then in another life I became a doctor and in the next, I met Albert Einstein. I was lawyers, politicians, bookkeepers, presidents. I went to so many universities in so many countries until I’ve tried them all. When people come of old age they are happy because they led a full life, but you don’t know what a full life is until you’ve experienced more than one. Because a life is just another word in the history books, a word so tiny you could hardly notice it in that sea of letters and sentences. But at one point you must realize that having a full life isn’t all that matters. You can lead a simple carver life and be the happiest man alive. You don’t need to find the cure for cancer to feel fulfilled, you just need to be surrounded by people you care about, people who make your life seem worth living.

And I met those kinds of people. But my soul went on, while theirs reached the sky above, finding peace in a faraway realm. I seemed stuck here on earth and I knew this wasn’t right. Someone else had the right to the lives I was living. I felt like with every host, I was stealing something from another soul who wasn’t lucky enough to be born.

For a long time, I thought that Livia had cursed me, that she was indeed some kind of witch and maybe she too was living on like me. So I sometimes tried to find her, but all my searches were in vain. I was also thinking a lot about the explosion I caused. What was that power that escaped my body and caused my death? I didn’t experience anything like it ever again. In the end, I accepted the fact that I was forever bound to this earth. Maybe it was my punishment for wanting to abandon my parents and have an adventure of my own, or maybe I really was cursed. At one point in the 20th century, I stopped trying to find answers and tried to live my life as best as I could.

I saw the two World Wars through the eyes of Clara who died right before Z-day, I marveled at the news of the Berlin Wall from my apartment in New York as Christian, I saw the world getting destroyed and then rebuilt. I saw people fighting and wars breaking out, the earth suffering but refusing to give up. And then I got here, to my life as Livia in the present day. My parents choosing this name for me seemed like a bad joke at first. But then I started to relate to Livia more and more. It was only a name that bound us together but I started thinking like her until I had found myself in a very similar situation to hers. I was lonely and my parents were always absent. The only friend I had was my neighbor Josh, who said he’d forever stay by my side. Well apparently forever only lasted for 15 years because he soon pushed me away. He stopped talking to me and I felt deeply betrayed. It wasn’t the same as what I did to Livia. I wasn’t able to leave with her because I had a duty to my parents. Nonetheless, I realized that in Livia's deranged mind she only wanted us to be together, just us two. I blamed her for what happened to me all this time but she was just a kid. And that’s when I realized that I never got over my first life, that even though I stopped looking for answers, I still wanted revenge for my parents.

But holding grudges doesn’t make life easier. We all make mistakes, some worse than others. Livia's mind was probably consumed by madness. And maybe I was too scared to meet her again in the afterlife. Or maybe I did all of this intentionally, so Livia could never be together with me, so she’d suffer for eternity wherever she was. But I think I’m ready now. Feeling betrayed makes you turn to inhuman actions and hatred can consume you. I felt so much anger after what Livia had done that I just exploded and killed everything on a radius of 4 kilometers with me. I’ll never understand why I kept living on in different bodies or why just now, was I able to realize that Livia's action hurt me more then I let show. Maybe I was running from my past and trying to find the perfect host, the perfect life with no sorrow or hate. But that doesn’t exist, there is no perfect life.

So it’s July 6th and I’m standing on the roof. Summer rain is slowly falling on the ground, making sizzling noises. And just like that, I feel my soul being lifted out of my body and my body thumping to the ground. I am ready to leave this Livia behind and lock eyes with the Livia from the past. Because I’m not scared anymore. Because I am ready to finally have some peace.