Year 19

“What year is it?” I ask. 

My stomach lurches off the bridge.

“19” 

“19 what?”

“Just 19”

I turn to look at him, baffled.

“Does such a year even exist?”

“It did.” He replies flatly.

He’s clearly in no mood to talk. Not that a disembodied soul has a mood, but I feel a certain energy emanating from him anyway. 

I begin to take in my surroundings. The light is so blinding, and the jolt was so sudden, that the chill in my bones takes a moment to register. I see now that we are surrounded by snow, and the sun reflecting off a world covered in white forces me to squint. I don’t know where I am. Just when. Year 19, apparently. 

I don’t know why we are here, or how my physical body sitting on a folding chair in 2036 can possibly feel cold this sharp in my limp fingertips. This is only my second past life regression, and I’m still so confused about the whole process. 

“Come.” he motions, floating beside me. 

The world is brand new. Fresh as a daisy, if daisy’s could survive the Antarctic.

I realize now that I am floating too, alongside. I hadn’t even noticed my feet leaving the ground. I begin to ask, “where are we going?” But the wind is whipping us so hard and so loud that I don’t waste my breath. As though he could hear my thoughts, the man beside me nods his head toward a cave, a hunchbacked peak jutting out of an immovable sea. In a blink we are inside, looking down as though mice on a ceiling. The cavern is deep, without a bottom it seems, and something inside me changes. I feel…different. I am changing, morphing into a body I do not recognize, and suddenly I am down below…with them. I am one of them. The first of us- humans. I feel all of their heartbeats at once, perhaps a hundred or more, it feels as though my chest will burst open and explode into a hundred birds scrambling to get out of this place. Something doesn’t feel right here. Something is off. 

My vision is still blurred, somehow, but I find myself looking up, searching for him. I am panicking now. I need to get out. 

“I don’t like this!” I cry into the ether. “I don’t like this one bit!”

But then, as though my shouts were no longer the silent screams I imagined them to be, every eye in the cave turn toward me. Two hundred glassy lenses boring holes through my chest, as if they’d only just realized an outsider was among them. 

The silence is deafening. 

In a flash, they close in on me. I had broken the spell. I was not supposed to be here, but I don’t know how to get out. I hadn’t learned how to do that yet. 

“Father!” I scream “Help me!”

They begin to close in, and I feel like a fish in a net.

Suddenly, I hear a voice in my head.

“Just breathe. You know what to do. You know how to come back.”

“No I don’t you sonofabitch! This wasn’t in the beginner’s manual!”

“Breathe. Relax. Let them come. Stop fighting it. You know how to get back.”

I try to let my spine relax, and I feel myself fall into the hard packed earth. I close my eyes.

“Where are you right now? Where is your body? Where is your physical body?”

I touch my pointer finger to my thumb, a trick I had learned as a baby for coming back to the present. For coming back home. 

Tap. Tap. Tap

The voice in my head is growing closer, even as my flesh begins to peel away. 

“Come home. You know how…”

Squeezing my eyes shut, I picture the wheel in my mind’s eye.

Click, click, click.

Faster and faster, it is almost a blur…

“Home,

Home, 

Home.” I repeat.

I can still hear the tribal cries of The First People, but I am no longer with them. I am floating above, my body dismembered below. 

Click, Click, click. 

I am doing it! It’s working! 

Up and up, I am a snowflake, floating away.

“Father! Look at me! I’m doing it!”

His voice, still inside me, “Where to next, my son?”

My heart said Home, but which one? Which Home is the right one?

“Let us see what else we can do today.” I hear him say.

I know I have to choose.

I have to choose a life, one of my many past lives, and live it again.

And I know without a doubt where I want to go next. I miss her too much to choose any other life. I have to see Sara again. I chose the one I like best, when we were children together. Back where it all started. I don’t care how it ends anymore. I don’t care that I can’t stay away. I want to go Home. And I know now that Home was never a place or a time but a space between people who were made together and set apart, forced to choose again and again to come back, no matter what.