Sleep took over, her body felt worn to the bone. Exhausted.
A familiar darkness welcomed her, the same one she had floated in for 12,000 years. She felt a sudden rush of pain and sadness.
Did I just imagine it all?
Or did she truly awaken as a woman in a world unfamiliar to her?
Fragments of memory flickered across her vision like a reel of film unspooling slowly, revealing vivid images of memories she was learning and trying to forget.
The images unraveling before her pulled her back through the echoes of past lives. With each flash, the images sharpened…
She had no choice but to confront her previous life, before she could accept her current one.
"I was alive twice."
But out of the two lives, I know I have only truly lived once.
During my first life, by the time my eyes and ears had formed and were functional, I always felt a lingering presence beside me. In my mother's womb, where I sensed regurgitations and felt reverberating sensations, I knew I wasn't alone.
There was a terrifying hunger beside me. A crushing will.
I knew I was still in the womb since I was still becoming, still forming. It was dark, dreadful, and the space was extremely limited. Despite this, I felt nestled, neither distraught nor restrained.
Even then, I knew my sexual orientation was male. I also knew the lingering presence in the womb with me was my twin. I felt an intense, overwhelming aura emanating from him.
The darkness I saw inside the womb was something my forming eyes could register. The dark, malefic, almost malevolent nature of my twin felt as though it were trying to assimilate me.
Not long after sensing my twin's malicious intent, I felt an intense discomfort that overwhelmed me, a sharp, stabbing, burning, and throbbing sensation.
In an instant, I was devoured.
Used as nourishment.
My twin consumed the being I was becoming.
He used me as sustenance. I suppose he was formed from deviance, from an intention filled with corruption, darkness, and all things foreboding.
If some souls are pure as light, his was a void, morbid and twisted.
I would like to believe my soul once resembled something innocent and untainted.
But looking at what I am now, I am nothing but a presence in absence, wandering for the past twelve thousand years.
I don't remember their voices anymore—my mother, my father—only the warmth of the womb before the pain came.
He was not made to become a monster.
But he became one the moment he chose survival over brotherhood.
And me? I was just the leftover soul—swallowed but not digested.
A fragment too stubborn to vanish.
The pieces of memory from her first life slowly faded and the familiar vast expanse of nothingness and darkness returned.
Wondering how she's going to get back to her new body, a flicker of blurry images started to form across the empty space.
Moments from her second life flashed before her eyes. She wondered if some of the memories she can still remember were real memories from this man's life instead of made up ones during her drift.
About my second life, that begana thousand years after the day my twin consumed me.
I lived a long life with a small family — a wife who passed too soon, a son, a daughter-in-law whose nature felt quietly deviant, and a single grandson.
My second life came and went a little too fast. I was a little too bitter, a bit too full of regret.
I was unable to live the life I wished for — full and fruitful.
Despite being given a second chance at life, I have squandered it, wasting my years wallowing in despair. I did not make enough friends, did not involve myself in a community, and I shunned my only son and his wife.
I died alone in a hospital bed, with only my grandson as a witness.
Before I passed, I told him, "There's strength in you… more than I ever had. Don't waste it the way I did. Save people. Be better. Be with those who give a damn, don't end up like me, alone and too late."
It was my final attempt at passing on wisdom, born from a life steeped in regret and bitterness.
I saw the storm waiting for him, the future that would hollow him out.
And I regret not screaming the warning louder.
Because I knew.
And I died with it still lodged in my throat.
Twelve thousand years have passed since that last life I lived.
I have been drifting, ceaselessly, continuously, incessantly, unceasingly, in this vast expanse of nothingness, only darkness. A repetitive emptiness. Desolate. Hollow.
How can the absence of everything have weight? Crushing. Constant. Inescapable.
Maybe it's taken this long for me to get another chance, since the life I've lived was never truly fruitful.
There is no light where souls like mine wander. There was no sound. No voice. No echoes. Nothing.
Only memory—faint and fading, like echoes trapped inside a sealed jar.
Or perhaps a vast emptiness and endless abundance all at once.
It's been twelve thousand years since.
For twelve thousand years, I have been drifting.
Not in torment. Not in peace.
Just... there.
No voice. No form.
No beginning. No end.
Or so she thought…