Death
doesn't care.
You
can be brave, fearful, not go gently, or welcome it.
Death
does not care.
Death
will come. Death will take you. From the battlefield where your shattered
body lies alone in mud and blood. From
the sanitary hospital bed with white sheets and your loved ones around you.
Death
does not care. It will take you.
I'm
on a first-name basis with Death.
Everyone
lives once. Everyone dies once. Everyone, that is, but me.
I've
had a thousand names. I've died a
thousand deaths. I am not a coward; I am
not brave. I am not human.
We
first came to this planet when your ancestors where finding out that throwing
rocks was an efficient way to kill animals.
Or each other. We were evolved
beyond bodies. We traveled in vessels of
pure energy, storing our consciousness in the interlacing electromagnetic
pathways. I was as big as a galaxy. I was as small as a quark.
We
found corporal beings vulgar yet amusing.
Like you keep a goldfish simply to watch it swim in its unknowingness,
we watched you.
Until
the accident. Until the one thing that
could never ever happen did.
I
got lost.
On
your planet, I got lost, left behind.
You
might think me a spirit or a ghost. I'm
not, I'm just immortal yet I needed a body to live in. No, I don't understand it. I'm a billion times smarter than your
smartest scientists and I don't know why I am cursed to live on this planet,
one life after the other. I die, and
wake up in a new body, a baby, a boy, a girl, black, white, yellow, red. I've been a slave (more times than I care to
count), a king, a peasant, a whore, a prince, a nun, a warrior.
I've
died a thousand deaths a thousand different ways.
I
think drowning is the worst, at least of the non-violent ways to die. Holding your breath until you can't hold it
any longer. Sweet relief as you inhale,
then . . . death, as your brain is deprived of oxygen. The bottom decks of the Titanic were probably
the worst. Add your most claustrophobic
nightmare with drowning. I was, to be
honest, glad it was pitch black. I
couldn't see the men around me dying, too, sentenced to death for the crime of
being boiler stokers.
But
I had also died so many violent, painful deaths, sometimes horrific
deaths. Too many to recount, too many to
list.
I'd
been this man for twenty-five years.
They
said I was wise beyond my years. Had the
eyes of an old man. If they only knew. Not that I remembered anything from my
previous lives when I was alive. I only
remembered when I was dead. Dead just
long enough to relive all the horrors I had experienced over epochs of humanity
before I would be shoved into the next life.
And then the next life. And the
next life.
The
circumstances you are born in determine more of your life than you ever
consider. The sharecropper's son who
becomes a billionaire, yes, it happens.
But most sharecropper's son will be sharecroppers. Or drunks.
Or join the Army.
I
joined the Army. It was 1939. The world was secure. The United States was protected by two big
oceans and President Roosevelt promised to keep the US out of the brewing
conflict in Europe. The Army was safe,
secure, and I had a roof over my head and three square meals a day.
I
was even happier when in spring of 1941 I was transferred to Schofield Barracks
in Hawaii. White sand beaches, warm
water, and beautiful women. I didn't
care what color someone was (I'd been that color at some point). I didn't know why but I always preferred
women, even when I was one.
I woke up on Sunday morning early. It was December.
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