I 2

Do you believe in reincarnation? This question and the person who said it have never left my mind, they always linger in some corner of my memories. Once I felt my being coming into existence, the question came to mind again. Like I used to say about reincarnation, this likely means I have some mission to be done in this world.

But what kind of reincarnation comes with my memories of the past intact? Right now I am in the form of a child who can barely form a coherent word being held in the arms of my own mother, whose name is Diana, and my father looking at me with a pair of tired eyes, whose name is Richard. I come to wonder if the young man I had met in the distant past happens to have reincarnated into that past world as well.

As time goes on its natural course, the ceiling is the only thing I observe with the shadows of objects changing shapes. I would love to know if my language capacity grows out of my own consciousness or it just grows naturally as I grow. I have never taken a single course of linguistics at school to have any tool I can analyze any of this. As I get to be able to walk, the first thing I do is read a book. An incomprehensible book with a language I absolutely can’t make any sense of, even though the sight seems to fill my mom with amusement and interest. I would love to ask my current parents a lot of questions and perhaps talk about my past life, if I can verbalize words. But it’s just out of nowhere to speak when there’s no need.

My parents in this world seem to make a thicker presence than my past ones whose forms and figures I can hardly draw in a picture. As I look at the picture my mom is making some noises of feigned awe over, I realized I drew the figure of my previous world’s mom without even realizing that, her figure when she sits by the door and the table waiting for my dad to come home. “What’s that?”, asks my mom Diana, to which I almost answer just to realize I have nothing concrete to emit out of my mouth, since the very concept of TV is something I have yet to absorb if it does exist in this world at all. “Oh, is that a fish tank?”, asks my mom again to which I seem to want to nod and she may take it as such but also feel like shaking my head at least internally. I’m more distracted by the thoughts of the objects surrounding me in this world. No TV, electricity – yet the rooms still light up at night through some lamps that don’t seem to be running on any coils. I remind myself of the time when I was scolded by my past mom to turn off the lights if I’m not in the room. The lights back in those days didn’t change a lot in terms of how bright they were by the time I became an adult. And yet this house feels much brighter to the point you can’t point out any corner of dimness in this house. “Oh Ryle, you want to read with dad?”, asks my dad whose serenity makes me oblivious to his presence. He resembles my past world’s dad who doesn’t make any noise around you as well, he once came home seeing me playing with some makeshift toy in the room and asked me “Do you want to learn some electronic stuff?”, to which I don’t remember of having nodded or shook my head but I definitely remember I didn’t answer verbally at all. “No, that’s not right, how are you gonna become an engineer like this?” His voice keeps the same volume without a single shift in tone, I sometimes lose track of what he's saying as if losing some signals to what is being transmitted, as his voice doesn’t feel like something I could have a grasp on with my unphysical hand, speaking hypothetically. “That’s a good one”, he says as I manage to get some coils right. “Dear, it’s time for dinner”, “Yeah. I’m coming,” his voice doesn’t change its quality even when he speaks to mom. My mind returns to reality as I sit on the lap of Richard, he looks down to my face and the book he’s holding, face has a faint smile and hands leaf through the pages slowly. He keeps whispering if I find the illustrations on the book interesting, to which I keep affirming, even though those illustrations don’t make sense since I don’t know what they are about and the texts written on those pages are still incomprehensible. I have several guesses to make: they are models presented in some exhibition museums, they are illustrations of historical buildings, and so forth.

Then suddenly the light in the room gets dimmer. “Dear, do we still have any lux crystals?” Dad asks mom, “Erm… no”, “Well there’s no choice here”. When I look at my dad, I can see a surge of blue illumination forming from his palm, he then moves toward the device and transfers whatever is on his palm to the device. The entire room gets brightened, although not to the same degree as it had, but still bright enough you can see everything in the room well. My mouth keeps being opened slightly in a daze. “What is it?” my dad asks. I’m not sure what he is thinking of my issue here and I try to let some answer out of my mouth, or at least some head gesture to indicate “It’s nothing”. I’m glad he didn’t pry me further since I’m not sure if I would be able to say the unreal sense of loss now. As if something important to me has been lost, something theoretically shouldn’t be possible if you know my life. Or maybe it does but I just love to deny it throughout my past life. When I was passing along the rail lines, the ball on my hands flew toward the rails and got crushed by a train that just ran through it. It’s not a shocking feeling but a gradual sense of unbearableness that kept me feeling uneasy for several days. But at that time it was something unrecoverable, in a sense. What I just saw right now isn’t even a loss in any actual sense. It should be a realization of the world I’m born into. That magic does exist or something like that is in this world. I wander toward my own room and fall into slumber.

The lack of questions I want to ask during sleep doesn’t bother me even though it should. My mind feels blank under the warm blanket on a cold night. I try to wander my mind to where it should be going but not sure how to even start. Maybe I should start with a small spark. I reach out to wonder why am I even here? A question that could have so many answers and may imply somebody willed my reincarnation. That’s as misty as my supposed mission, something my mind only admits just now. No matter how I go on with my life here, there’s just no way I can figure out my supposed mission if it even exists unless it’s presented directly to my face. Perhaps it doesn’t even exist at all and my reincarnation doesn’t hold any meaning. I try to look somewhere, wander somewhere among the realm of my memories in the past. It’s like a maze since I had lived so many years in that past life. Then that young man flashes into my mind and I try to remember his words. Now I finally remember he did ask me to relive his life, to which I certainly did agree. So perhaps this very life of mine is to realize his very wish. I don’t remember how he wished I could live this life, and maybe he didn’t even say anything specific, more than some want to understand. So my mission here is to try to understand the life he has lived.

It's getting colder and colder. As the days passed, snow started falling onto the ground I saw outside. This could very well symbolize the last hurdle that hinders me before I step out into the wider world. Certainly, the young man I had seen in my past life has given me a novel, which I had previously devoured. Now I can’t say I remember the content, but I’m sure it’s very important since it contains the details of what happened with his life in this world, and maybe my own life from now. I wish I had been able to read the novel one last time before my departure from that world.

My own biology doesn’t raise any news as I gradually manage to make sense of the books I get to read in my house to some degree. Maybe for all the joys that I had gotten from this act of reading, it’s not something truly special and would be just something I continue with right in this life. The lines I have communicated to my parents don’t amount to a lot more than the daily greetings and tiny topics. All of the questions and things I would love to ask just never manage to come up, like I have no actual demand for them at all, it’s like trying to wake up when you have pulled an all-nighter the previous day. I just live my youth like that. Then as the snows disappear, I finally manage to go outside.

I just can’t get used to the sight of a land without electrical poles. Perhaps that’s the most abnormal sight I have seen in this world. Even more so, the forest of trees and plants are all around here, even though it’s already rare to see a forest throughout my life in the past. I did take a train to go to some rural provinces back then and the number of green trees I have seen was countable. A look to the sight here: I see way too many varieties. Leafs can even have purple and bright yellow colors in the same area. The many swirling branches that some trees may have. These are the sort of things even if I want to write in a novel I can’t find words to describe accurately.

Feel lonesome, those trees and plants. As if a bunch of different people are coming to a city for jobs, and few of them have a family in that very city. Variety without relation.

Isn’t that a good thing? As people in my past world would usually say. There’s no support there, but if you can’t handle it then you can’t handle life. That’s just the way it is and it shows how good we are. Some do take pride like that, I felt like most of us didn’t.

My mom lets out excited noises as she keeps pointing toward these trees and plants we are passing by. She seems surprised I manage to retain their names so quickly as she has just said their names. I deep down worry more about the things I may need to learn about them, or the lack of it. I don’t feel like I have to here, unlike back in the past world – I remember some biology lectures that stop short when it finishes talking about the structure of a cell, but fail to connect the relevance to other things. I felt anxiety then, something that never got quelled and only replaced by other anxieties, which was still an improvement.

There are just so many details on these maps, the roads and the forests and mountains, the rivers, the lands.

I say the lands because the colors of the soils on the map transform gradually as your eyes glance to the areas around the borders. Mom says there are continents without human beings, I’m more surprised by how there’s a concept equivalent to what my past world used (human) as well but can’t say that to her. I have always tried to convey to her that perhaps there’s another world that has something like electrical trains, but the idea doesn’t mean to her anything more than speculative fiction with some newly coined concept of “electricity”.

She asks if I want to go to the capital on foot or transportation. The capital? In the center of the map is a huge and sophisticated city surrounded by firm walls. It’s to the North of our house and should take about, as my mom says, 30 minutes on foot. I’m not sure what my parents are saying on our path, thus my mind wanders to other kinds of thoughts. I see a bird fly past the blue sky. I don’t remember my past world having such blue and white clouds. The path isn’t any dusty. The shadows formed by the trees, even if redundant, still make the ground look nice with its spotty lights. “Hello,” says my dad to some people I didn’t even notice passing by. The number of houses around here is still numerous enough. More people appear as we get nearer to the gate that should lead us to the capital.

It’s huge. It’s dazzling. The capital of hope, the capital of dreams. The capital of aspirations – as I read from the books my dad doesn’t know I can read them now.

I see people passing up and down, a passage from one of those books comes to my mind of what they are trying to do. Finding a place, finding something to work, trying to make names. “You shall come here to study some day”, says my mom. He makes it like it’s gonna be long before I come here to study. So where is my primary school at? Somewhere around the Southern region (my family lives to the South of the capital)?

What do I say about the capital? It’s beautiful, it’s dazzling. Although I’m sure soon I will get used to it just like the city I had to move to in my past life – which is a normal city, just happens to be modern. Besides, by nature this is just a place, with gathering people. I can see transportations by horses and some sort of vehicle just like the trains back in my world, they run on some rail lines without the coarse edges, and without electricity. I wonder if electricity even exists in this world or not. Perhaps some day I shall discover some magnet, or it has been somewhere in this world already. “Careful,” my dad pulled me back as a crowd of forwarding horses with uniform wearing men passed through the gate to the West. I notice weapons too. “What do you want to become some day, Ryle?” I say I don’t know and he chuckles. How can I even answer? I have yet to know what I can even do in this world. Some feelings of anxiety suddenly resurge as I’m reminded of when I still hadn’t managed to figure out what it meant to survive life. Shall there be jobs I didn’t know that exist here? Shall there be jobs I can’t do like back in my world? Regardless I shall have to do whatever life requires of me to survive anyway.

I can see more people using magic here just like I saw my dad did the other day. I don’t know what I should feel about this fantasy thingy. Shall I learn them? “Well, you shall learn them,” I didn't realize my parents heard what I accidentally slipped out of my mouth. Their eyes suggest magic is something meaningful. My mind goes back to the past world, my dad was fixing a bullet train and I was gazing at him doing that. He also showed me the electrical stuff he was operating. I say he showed, but he may not be aware of my own existence, and was just showing what he was doing to anybody who was there.

Home, Southern region. I don’t talk much to my (current) dad about the books I have read. The thought just never came across my mind, until now. Or my mom. As I think this, she appears in my room. “Do you want to learn some magic?” Her middle finger traces a diagram on the floor which illuminates a blue color. She brings my hand over to hover above it. “This is weird, the reaction doesn’t seem to be strong,” she says as the light gets dimmer. “Try to feel it, sense it, see with your heart. Now say it with me: Elemental Water!” She raises my palm toward the wall. I can feel something inside myself, and try to channel it to my palm, and focus my best to exert it out. “Ah…” My mom makes some noise that suggests what emitted from my palm is abysmal. Just some drops of water.