If I shared anything with my reincarnations, it was in our belief in fate. Though each previous version of me held a very different perspective of it. The me that had died in the Great Depression thought it a terrible thing, wicked and omnipotent. The me that had lived as king in the middle ages thought it a gift presented by God. Me, I believed it a promise.
My next reincarnation was a baby with deep blue eyes and pink skin named George. He started his life alone. George cried so much that they had to put him in a separate room, devoid of the other infants. A nurse checked in on him every few hours. Nobody blamed her. She had more pressing matters to attend to, such as George’s mother, whose heart rate was steadily growing out of control and her breathing stuttered.
When the young lady died, she did so whispering her son’s name. I wasn’t sure if she ever even got a look at him. In that hospital room, with the flat-line beep of a heart rate monitor, the nurse checking on George stood, lips quivering and fists clenched.
In this world, children were supposed to be loved by their parents. If not the mother, who else would? For George, it was nobody, not even himself.
The orphanage boasted posters of smiling blonde-haired boys and girls with deep blue eyes. George could’ve been a literal poster boy if he ever smiled. But no matter how many stuffed animals they threw his way, how many hugs and smiles they offered him, they could never get those lip-locked edges to curve up.
By the time he had hit thirteen, he had already smoked his first cigarette and drank his first beer. Nobody wanted to tell him, but everybody knew. Nobody adopted teenagers. He would be a lifer, an unwanted child turned into an unwanted adult.
And on his seventeenth birthday, he bought a gun.
None of us watching were worried at all for other people. Despite everything that happened, George was a gentle boy and that was his problem. Nobody could reach him through his overpowering politeness. It took a mother’s love to chip away at the boy and all he had was an old photo of a ghost who once loved him.
He snuck out when the moon had hit its apex, left all the money he had in a small package with a letter. It read: Thanks for taking care of me. And that was it. He didn’t sign it, didn’t address it to anyone, he wrote it all in a cheap pen and stuffed it inside with twelve-hundred dollars cash.
The spot he chose was out of the way. Nobody was nearby to be disturbed. No runners would come this way to be scared. The only selfishness he allowed himself was that it was by a river, a black canvas of glittering moonlight.
“I was never meant to live,” he told himself and us. “This is fate.”
Some of us nodded with him. Others shook their heads. I stared, my neck stiff, eyes unblinking as he put the gun to his temple.
“No,” I whispered. “Don’t do it.”
Some of us, the more boisterous ones, cheered along, egging the boy to pull the trigger. They had seen a thousand lives and would see a thousand more until all of mankind vanished. A single life in a single point of time meant nothing to them. But for me, this was my first.
“No,” I said and stood from my seat. “Please.”
The screen flickered to the tremble of his finger. Soon, it would go completely black. He would fulfill his fate.
“No!” I screamed. “This isn’t how it should go!”
The boisterous ones were no longer laughing. The others around me turned away their eyes. At one point in time, they had all been me. They had thought that life mattered, that our pain had meaning. But after a thousand shows of a thousand lives, most of them only slept through the show.
I clenched my fists, the words swelling in my lungs. Then, I took the breath to give them life and I prayed, that somehow, I wasn’t just a dead man with a loud mouth.
“Don’t pull,” I yelled, tears pouring down my cheeks and snot from my nose. “Not until you have a chance. Maybe you never will, maybe this will be how it always is, maybe I’m wrong about everything, but there’s meaning in your pain! I can’t tell you if I’m right or if I’m certain.” My voice dropped low. “I can only promise.”
George closed his eyes. He hadn’t heard me, of course he wouldn’t.
Then, George broke down, the gun still pressed to his head. “So cruel,” he whispered to nobody. “After all this, all I have is a promise. That’s all my fate has to offer.”
My eyes went wide. My jaw dropped. “And that’s enough,” I said, my voice too low even for myself to hear.
There, George stood, the gun rigid in his hand. And when his tears fell, so too did his gun.
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