Do you believe in reincarnation? People ask it like a polite confession — a question tossed into conversation to make death feel negotiable. For me it is not a theory or a comfort. It is a calendar I have lived by for as long as I can remember. The sun rises, the season tilts, and when breath leaves a body it is rarely the end of anything; it is only the punctuation between notes in a song I have hummed a hundred times over.
Ant, rat, snake, bird, lion. Soldier, thief, scholar, sailor. I have live For thousands of years— a number I keep loose because it feels less like a tally and more like a bruise. I have been small and large and everything between. I have felt the thin, hot scrape of a blade and the soft, patient press of a mother's thumb. I have tasted mud and spice and wine that made my knees go weak. I have died in so many spectacularly ordinary ways that death became a domestic chore: a thing to be expected, to be scheduled around. At some point the particularities stop mattering. The modes of your exit — crushed, burned, drowned, stabbed in a courtyard while you argue about honor — become variations on a grisly theme.
Memories, though. Memories are treacherous friends. They flare and fade like lanterns in wind. At birth the archive opens like a book dropped in the rain: parts of chapters wash away, ink blurs. What remains is a skeleton of skill and a few stubborn images. I can saddle a horse because once I did it for week after week; I cannot tell you the face that taught me. I can bind a wound by touch, but I have no recollection of the first tearful hand I steadied. The world, for its own mercy, hides whole rooms of your past in attics you are not allowed to enter. It spares you from madness by neat cruelty.
For a long time I let my lives be like borrowed coats. Name me what you like: the sound of it means little when the next life peels it off. I collected talents the way other people collect coins — small, bright, and utterly replaceable. If someone crossed me in one life and then trod the earth as somebody else in the next, I found them. New names do not confuse the business of retribution. It was sport at first. Revenge has an elegance to it; a mathematics. Find the link, close the loop, move on. Pleasure is a thing you learn to ration when every death makes tomorrow a certainty.
Then boredom arrived. You cannot imagine boredom until you have been bored for a century. Talent becomes a malady. Everything is easy, and easy things lose their flavor. I learned languages until the sounds meant nothing at all. I became a master of trades and weapons and manners and then watched the petals of novelty fall like ash. The world reduced to a series of checkboxes. Live. Die. Learn. Repeat. It stopped having meaning when it refused to end.
That is when I began to choose differently. Not out of redemption — that is too romantic for the work — but out of a stubborn unwillingness to let the sameness win. I started burying little falsehoods and small truths in places no one would look. I learned the crude architecture of memory-binding in an age of tower-mages who thought themselves gods; I learned how to split a thought into halves and hide one under a stone so that the rest of me could go on pretending I did not care. I learned rituals that bent the law of endings by the width of a hair. None of it was noble. Mostly it was survival and the absurd hope that if I could stitch together my own breadcrumbs I might one day find my way to something I did not want to forget.
And then, despite every practice and precaution, I met her.
People imagine meetings like thunderclaps. They hope for prophecy and dramatic light and a chorus of angels in the wings. Mine was not like that. It was a winter that had no right to be warm. I was lost on a footpath that wanted to be a stream, and the world had narrowed to the white of breath and the thin sound of my own teeth worrying at cold. She appeared with a lamp and a bundle of bread and a silence that fit like a glove. She did not look like a legend. She looked like lunch, like a coin in a pocket, like the small sensible thing people mistake for ordinary until they are holding it.
She tied a crude bandage on a finger I had nicked, warmed my hands in hers, and asked without pretense if I was hurt. There was no flourish. No celestial verdict. Just the whole-handed, urgent kindness of someone who picks up the nearest thing and fixes it because the earth has no time for sermonizing. Her hair smelled of smoke and close wood; it had color, thought I had forgotten color. She had a laugh that made dirt look like a place worth keeping. The world tilted a degree, and in that tilt the list of trivialities I had held all my lives — triumphs, trophies, the exact manner of a trap — slid into the gutter and began to seem as useless as toys a child outgrows.
You have to understand this: I have seen the same faces wear a dozen masks. I have watched lovers' names shift across tongues and watched friends become enemies because the ledger of souls is a ledger that never forgets. But when I looked at her — not the idea of her, not what stories make of people, but the particular, stubborn individual — something inside me which had decided long ago to stop counting began to keep score again. I felt, absurdly and vividly, the urge to keep a name because names in her mouth were anchors, not rags.
I tried cynicism as my shield. It did not hold. I tried avoidance; I failed. I promised myself the usual cruelties: remain detached, collect the pleasure, move on. In other lives I practiced an artful absence. In that moment, with her fingers smelling of bread and the winter breathing around us, absence felt like cowardice. I made a vow I had not planned to make: to find this small human among all my stars and all my masks, life after life. It was a silly vow, a concession to sentiment, but vows are tools too. They give direction. They give leverage.
So I planted tokens. Tiny things — a ribbon tucked under a stone, a whistled five-note tune I taught a child to hum while running, a carved notch on a chapel beam — each a thread tied between lives. I learned to split memory into containers: one part to be lived and forgotten with the body, another part to be hidden away for the next dressing of skin. I hid a shard of myself in a place guarded by nothing but luck and a name that would mean nothing to anyone but me. It was contrivance, perhaps, and superstition, and yet it felt necessary in a way the endless ease of my other choices had never been.
Now listen, new one — the one whose hands will learn to tie the same ribbon without knowing why. Keep the little thing in your pocket that is warm when the moon is right. Keep the hum the market women sing when the bread is hot. Keep the shape of her laugh in a place you can reach blind. Do not be clever in a way that discards wonder. Cleverness is a thief if it learns to take at the speed of habit. Love her without turning it into strategy, even when every part of you knows exactly how strategy tastes.
There are people who read ledgers of souls like housewives read grocery lists. They mark what favors are due, who died owing whom, which lives have been kind and which have been debts unpaid. There are those who would bargain for the pattern I carry, auction the seams of memory for coin and power. They keep accounts across generations. They count, and when a number grows large enough, they notice. When they notice, they send for someone who knows how to stitch or unpick.
Do not let them find you first.
Above all, do not forget how she set the world proper again simply by being herself. Keep her face as if it were a map with hidden roads. Keep the nick at her knuckle that burns when she laughs. Keep the way her voice drifts into questions as if curiosity were a form of prayer. Keep these not as trophies but as a responsibility. For if you fail, it will not be only your lifetimes that become practice rounds. The ledger will mark another loss and the people who keep ledgers will nod and file it away like a thing they were owed.
I have seen too many endings to mistake the quiet ones for harmlessness. I have been careful and reckless and nothing in between. I have taught myself to split a soul and bury a piece, to bind a memory to a ribbon, to swallow a lullaby and call it a secret. I have done all of that because she is ...)