One last chance

As promised, I had been reborn to my old world, but into a new body, a new family, a new life. It was quite strange not to be able to move my limbs as demanded by my brain, but that was just something I had to deal with until I was finally able to move on my own. My new parents thought it was quite strange that I almost never cried, but they didn’t complain about it since it allowed them to sleep at night. The only times I tried to get their attention were when I got hungry or my teeth started to grow. Growing teeth are one of the things you don’t remember from your own childhood. I can tell, I get why babies start getting loud at such times. My new parents tried to spend as much time with me as they could. Of course, playing peekaboo or something was quite mind-numbing, but at some point, it started to entertain me. It was like my mind started to grow accustomed to the age of my body. If things would proceed like this, I would forget everything I had experienced, everything I had learned, until I was in fact, nothing but a baby. What would that mean to me? If I basically forgot myself and rewrote it with a new person. What would remain of my old self? Or was this the hook to getting reborn in your own world? Living, but basically not living? Because what would remain if my body was gone, as well as my memories? Aren’t the memories basically what makes us who we are?

I tried to fight against forgetting even the slightest detail. I tried to recall every slight moment every day, like a prayer before bedtime. My old life, all the other lives I had, my current life. The effort it took was taking all my daily energy reserves, like my new brain wasn’t yet strong enough to hold this flood of information. Like you tried to fill a bathtub of water into a single glass.

After some time, it was less exhausting and easier to recall these memories. I imagined that I had managed to train my mind to the extent that I had defeated forgetting myself but as the years passed, as I grew accustomed to my new family, my new friends, my new life, I started to think less and less about my past.

The experiences faded in my head and took a grey shade whenever the pictures flashed through my mind.

There had to be a way to save the story of my life. But I couldn’t possibly tell someone else to write it down. If somebody found these writings, I would have a difficult time explaining them without breaking my promise of not telling anybody about my reincarnation. On the other hand, if anybody read about my experiences, they wouldn’t believe it to be true anyways unless they had experienced it themselves.

If only I hadn’t lost my diary along with all those other things I had left behind in the void. Granted. The revolver would have been an issue, even if the items somehow would have appeared in my life without raising suspicion, but if I had just been able to keep the book, I’d worry less.

I was in primary school when I had these thoughts. Maybe people would have thought I was writing a book if they found my notes, in case I started rewriting my diary. But in order to tell my story, even without the necessary dramatization it would take to be a full story, that nobody would ever think of as true, I would require a lot of difficult words, nobody would believe a regular primary school student would know. I didn’t really know the limits of my promise to not tell about my reincarnation, but it would be better to not risk it by starting to write something like this too early. Because the only thing I knew was that I had to write it down. A strong urge that had kept bothering me for a long time, basically forced me to write my story down as soon as possible, even if it had to be covered as a novel.

As I entered university, I left my parents flat and, due to cost reasons, shared a flat with Hikaru, a friend I had met in middle school and held dearly ever since.

That was also about the time when I deemed that nobody would think of it as strange if I wrote a “fantasy novel”. To play it safe, this also was the working title I had written on the first page of the small black booklet I had bought for this purpose. It took me quite some time but eventually I managed to find the right balance between what I had experienced and some artificial extras that I sprinkled into the story to not feel like I had broken my promise. I changed the names in addition, especially my old one of course, just to make sure nobody would think that I had broken my promise and even added an overly dramatic prologue that the book definitely couldn’t catch up to.

I wrote a little every evening, just like I had done it the last time with my diary. Writing down my story felt like scratching an itching I had felt since my reincarnation. It had been necessary, which is why I couldn’t stop writing shortly before reaching the end of my story. I had been sitting in the shared living room of our flat, hunched onto the couch, writing until I was surprised by the chirping of the birds outside. I would be late for my studies. I quickly prepared to leave, not even having the time to eat something before leaving and completely forgetting about my “novel”, now laying on the table in the living room.

The day was basically wasted. I attended the lessons, but in the end, I didn’t catch up on most of the things explained there. Not sleeping for an entire night was quite bad for your brain’s ability to learn something new. Who would have thought?

After returning home I fell flat on the couch and slept for at least three hours.

When I woke up, I felt hungry again. I had used the lunch break to eat a late breakfast, but that alone of course wasn’t enough to get around.

At some point Hikaru left his room.

“Smells good…. at least for something you cook. Got something left for me?”

“You have to work on your flattery.”, I reply coldly, but take a second plate out of the cupboard above the sink.

“You are a lifesaver!”

“Don’t mention it.”

The dish, I went for a simple curry since that was basically everything that could be cooked with what was left in our storage, was not especially difficult to cook, but it still took time and concentration to not mess it up.

“What have you been doing the whole day? If you were this hungry, you could have made something yourself. Or could have gone out to shop for some groceries. I already jumped in the last time, as you might remember. It’s your turn.”

“Oh, you know, this and that….”, he avoided to answer my question.

I turned to look at him. He sat on the couch, trying to look innocent. I didn’t understand the reasons for his behavior, but then again Hikaru was just Hikaru. ‘This and that’ might mean basically everything. He might have slept the whole day or gotten lost in a new game or show or whatever.

“Alright. Keep your secrets. That doesn’t change the fact that it’s your turn with the groceries.”, I said with a dismissive shrug before filling our plates and carrying them towards the table in front of the couch.