Eternally recurrent

He knew the drill pretty well. One short flashback of those twenty something years, the cold steel gun scratching the towel. The head neatly surrounded by that cloth piece, everything in order. Nice and clean, sitting in the bathtub. One last second of doubt, that tiny shaking in the hand, the finding of lacked strength. Eyes firmly shut, a small grinding of teeth pressing each other. The pull of the trigger.

The silence.
And being born all over again.

Since his discovering of the conscious reincarnation, he had been searching for the perfect life experience. Never complete enough, always something went wrong with the craddle lottery. So he started taking the shortcut to reset. As soon as he got offered the first glimpses of suffering and fighting for a living, he would jump from the firm soil of certain disadvantage to the pool of chances.

Yet every single time, it seemed his luck was diminishing, or the world was going to hell altogether. Maybe both.

There had been some good streaks in the past. Fourty years he got as a spoiled millionaire, and when the obvious car crash under influence put an end to those, he came back an even wealthier sole heir of some brutally overpaid footballer, back in the time there were footballers. Around the time they started being slain by headhunters. Along with their families.

But taking a closer look at things, the last maybe ninety births ranged from bad to awful. Nice hospitals giving way to crappy beds giving way to filthy alleys.

And every time he got back and decided to carry on for the first five or seven years to see where things were getting, there was that long period of early numbness. Lack of body control, no free wandering. The sleepiness and the adjoining dreams. And nightmares, loads of them. Terrifying as those were, still they beat the alternative of being awake. And thinking.

Thinking had gotten heavier, nothing resembled that old process of merely associated electric pulses. Perhaps the fact of being a thousand years old was overcooking his Ether with the cold flame of experience. Or, as he started feeling the last dozen of childhoods, there was actually no such thing as thinking; it resembled now a kind of receiving, as if there was an external something putting knowledge in his everlasting mind. And oh boy, some of those new things to know would send shivers through the plethora of spines he had had.

The last two certainties that hit his being had been worse than the usual.

First, he realized that time flew onwards carrying him, whether a material incarnation or a soul waiting for a new carcass. There was no going back to simpler times, and as all around him Ages darkened in turmoil once again, so did he in his many becomings. It doesn't matter what shape the planet under your feet has when time is a long, unidirectional flat line.

And of course there was that freaking sense of karma. Couple of births ago he got as far as getting a quick look around his new reality, clean and safe and warm (oh he missed being warm) until that bomb took away the chance and prospect along with the room and the rest of the hospital. With the place where his unused ears had been until just then still ringing, Truth itself somehow whispered right to his mind that he not only deserved that, but even was the one that caused it, somehow.

And now he felt that was Truth after all.

For never had he guessed how the strings of lives cut short by his own hand could have gotten somewhere to make a better world for himself to go back to. And suddenly it all made sense. His gift was his damnation, fulfilled in the exact moment he realized there was no going back to set things straight, to do something better, something valuable, something that lasted echoing goodness through ages.

Something different.