In the first of my lives, my lush, green colour was the gift of my chlorophylls, little cells pumping through my grassy veins. As I swayed in the wind, me and my friends came together to form a soft, fresh mattress for the human children that fell upon us, their young bodies heavy from the shots they carried. As they lay on me, deep redness gushing from their curled mouths, I saw their eyes, that haven’t seen enough. My roots drown in their blood, my veins rot with death.
My second life, I was the 6.8 mm metal, crafted by an unfeeling machine at the mercy of Men that dare not let their stern minds wander about my later usage. Even I do not understand the full range of my copper power. Your finger unleashed me from my cold chamber, and I am hurled through the air. I shot past birds, I grazed black feathers, I teared through layers of tender flesh, the epidermis, the dermis, the hypodermis. My shiny glory breached the mere nine years of diligent development, knowing the brink of a decade shall never be crossed. Though I must confess, my accomplishment is subject to a mistake, a bare inch, it’s almost unseeable, almost forgivable.
This was my third life. I was the origin of life and the beginning of death. One might call me a raindroplet, another a destructive tsunami, but that does not change the essence of my being. I am H2O an inorganic compound, tasteless, odorless, and nearly colorless. I could be sweat, a homeostatic response to a rise of cortisol levels due to extreme concentration on the precise usage of a Colt CM901 during the pressing summer heat. I could be the one nanoliter that makes the friction between an index finger and metal. I could also be the macroscopic molecule which squeezes its way from pore to cell to keep a child alive, and even after death, I still labor until the very end. I could be the destructive flood that blinds a woman’s eyes when a wave of sadness takes over her entire body and it becomes my duty to make her release endorphins.
In my fourth life, I was the sound of tragedy itself. Her ears heard me before her eyes saw death. I was the childish laughter, the epitome of purity, the gift of forgiveness, the source of endless happiness. I was the ball jumping and thudding on the grassy terrain and the wind howling through the air. I was the exhale and inhale, the innocent, short breaths and the long, soft ones. I was the distant rustling of leaves and the sharp inhale, the pull and release, when I became Chaos. I divided myself into pressing silence filled with panic, and into the blood in your ears when I crescendoed into a scream from which the murder of crows flees. I filled with stomach-twisting terror and anger so deep you would not be able to discern the heart-wrenching sadness in it. I was an imploration to useless ancestors and clement gods, a wave of sound which made the ground tremble with mercy. But oh, sweet mother, the one thing she was begging for, I could never be again.
In my fifth life, I pulled the trigger on the poor thing itself.
Two thirds in, I was the mother who was ripped of her child. He made me forgive the world. I woke up each day knowing somebody was crying for me, that my being was needed. Every moment he spent in the apple of my eye, I was reborn again and again. I watched him run around in the kitchen, chasing after a fly he didn’t know he’d never catch. I watched him bathe in the tub with the plastic ducks, and how his arms splashed the soapy water on the wall, I knew would stain. But what is a stain on the wall, if not a memory of his existence. Now, I let every fly get away, for they should live the life he was robbed of, and I spend my hours contemplating the bathroom wall, staring at the spot that seems to fade by the day, so I engrave it into my memory. One day, his voice, his touch, his smell, all mine, will be but a faint breeze that rattles the cobwebs of my mind. The day my beautiful boy was killed, my own flesh and blood became dust, and my heart froze to immortal sorrow.
My seventh life, I spent being a kid. I played with Dodo, my dog and Dolly, my duck. Mama and I went on walks and picked mandarins from the neighbours’ trees. She made marmalade out of them, and I ate them for breakfast with butter and milk. I crawled into mama’s bed late at night after the storms outside made the tree branches hit my bedroom’s windows and Dodo wasn’t there. I was scared to wake her up, because she had been so tired, but when I snuck into her arms and she held my head and stroked my hair, I slept the whole night and woke up really, really late in the morning.
In my eighth life I would be myself, sitting in my chair, writing about dead children, and talking cartridges at two in the morning, because how can I cry about derivatives and complain about school, when on the other side of the world or just a few kilometres away people are starving, trembling, being raped and tortured and murdered, and cease to exist. And I tell myself, maybe when I have lived a few decades I can make sense of the world, of the hows and whys of fairness and balance, or rather their nonexistence. Maybe when I am old and wise enough, I’ll understand why eternal pain is tied to humanity, and why it is humans themselves that knot it to their heads. No one but Man himself pulls the trigger of the gun he made himself. And death has become such an easy word to utter, romanticised, glorified, portrayed with beautiful sorrow, and diamond tears. Such worthlessness we attribute to a distant human life, even dogs and cats avail themselves more of our empathy. A death here a death there, and even if it wanders everywhere, it is not until your own eyes have heard a scream, your mouth has gone dry, and your eyes have been blinded, that ‘life’ gains its true importance.
My ninth life has yet to come. But this time I will be older and wiser; I will have lived quite a few times and will have gained a deep knowingness of the world. One where I will know that my glasses sit waiting patiently on the crown of my head, before I think I have lost them. One where I meet a spider and do not judge it for its eight legs, and let it live peacefully in the corner of my room. Or maybe I become the spider and finally experience the justice of human emotion. Maybe I’ll turn back time and be reborn as a mother and I’ll understand what it must have felt like for her. Maybe then my heart will beat with patient kindness, when I explain the technological mysteries of the 21st century. I’ll be born and raised with love and loss, I’ll grow into a mature child, an annoying teenager, and hopefully into a responsible adult. Or perhaps I’ll be reborn as an onion, and blamed for countless cries and burning eyes, and feel a guilt that will peel my layers off, one by one. If I am born as a snake, and bite the dust eternally, I won’t live forever, but one day I will choke on my tail like Ouroboros to find what I did not know I was searching for. And finally, I will morph into an intangible being, a mere mythological memory, where I’ll end up like poor old Sisyphus whose arms have tired of pushing the big bang rock of fatuous, unanswerable questions. But lo and behold, this time, I’ll be much cleverer; I’ll put a bright star on top of the mountain of life, to make me push harder.
Trust me, this time I’ll win this game.