a second life

since my heart stopped

This life started when I was 19. I died on a hospital bed and came back to a defib charging sonorous above my body. Born again, naked, looking into a light for the grips of reaching hands.

In those years, I took meticulous care of my records, the days of my second infancy. I wrote like a racquetball hitting the wall, crashing loud, and running to the open air. Getting lost, crashing, running back. Every emotion was fresh again, as though I’d torn myself a new limb and grew a phantom that I only remembered half the time. Oh yes, I’d say to myself twice a week. A tinge of hope. A glimpse of dread.

I’d lived a secluded past life, an antique treasure kept under lock and key for fear of tarnishing. Eaten alive by moths and dust behind closed doors, my rust begging to be set free. A clock tick-tick-ticking until someone would be let in to come and fix its half step late. A mantlepiece tired of holding its gears upright, a room too scared to let it go. Only when it completely stopped, only when it died, did the caretakers call a repairman. It’s terminal, he said. Looks like we’ll have to start anew

My first days of living were pained, blurry, kept behind plathian walls. No ovens, no shoelaces, no pencils in your own quarters. It was incubation, the womb. Where I sat on the edge of the windowsill and waited again and again, reminiscing on other confines of another life. Like a nightmare that spills into reality, bits and pieces from a past life would come through. I called old friends and struggled to say anything of worth. Cried myself awake again and again. Two tissue boxes in one hour, just a regular intake on a Tuesday. This new body takes its prisoners like it takes its imprisonment—one day at a time, to live that same day over and over and over again.

And when it’s over, when the water breaks, you’re set to infancy. Everything was still under provisions. My plate, perfectly portioned for me. My job, mindless. My classes, online. Everything was rationed for me to devour slowly. Baby steps, little infrequent treats. A free sandwich from the deli boy I had a crush on at work. Every break in my car, not looking at each other and arguing over something hypothetical. The scar on my lip turning white. My skin is tickling with something on its molecules, thickening slowly, so slowly. For now, everything hurt and you didn’t know why. I had so many raw patches of flesh, bandages still on my elbow. I changed them regularly, dabbed ointment beneath your nose. These are habits I learned as I grew old.

One day, and I had been counting down, it was time to walk familiar streets again. New conditions, new stipulations. But a return, steeped in shame and worry, a knowledge that there would be no welcome entourage. I had made three friends in my past life—one who would be there, one who had moved to Spain, and one who had spurned me before I’d even resuscitated myself in his life (a shame, I’d dreamed of him most). I did a trial run for a month, felt next to everything, and came back fearful. A child only knows from her visible responses, and there was nothing more spiteful than a familiar silence.

And the first days were difficult. Everyone seemed to have lived in their bodies longer. Only I had been reborn. I walked into rooms interrupting routine, asking questions a little too loud. And here? What am I to do here? A shake of the head, a harmless laugh shocking my nervous waters dry. I’d spend my days trying to fit new teeth into old molds. I think my hands used to hold themselves sideways for prayer. A coffee with an old pastor with a notebook, ready to pencil myself in anywhere. Somewhere familiar, I hoped, where I would know how the motions went. I did it over and over again, feeling more and more hollow every time. That life wasn’t mine, I thought. That life wasn’t this.

Insert, a statement read plain. A kiss on a rooftop, a subsequent smile. A word of compliment, a constant invite. He had been in his body so long, and I was so new. I thought I could learn, and I found all the makings of a love I hadn’t felt in this new form. We’d lie in the dark, limbs interlocked, fingers tracing circles. Have you ever been in love? I asked. He said no, he didn’t think so. I said I wasn’t sure. Unsaid: could we learn together?

The days went racquetball again. My records tidy. Some days, untouchable and good. Others, absolute irreparable psychic damage at the hands of a denial. A party invite, another flirt in the classroom. Then silence. A good grade, a good paper. An awful score on a quiz. I felt everything quiet, but the buzz was loud—a hum unintelligible and constant, tinnitus in an ocean-soaked ear. I hadn’t been to the beach yet in this life. I wondered if it would be cold like it had been last time. I hardly remembered anything aside from a striped shirt and a shiver.

I wrote of my first beer, my first fuck. I wrote of nightmares, of tremors that would shake my body. How I needed more than double I was prescribed to do nothing. Entire pages would tilt from my medicine-induced slumber—a growing addiction, a tenuous reliance. This must be normal, I thought, since I knew nothing else. Forget the age gap to infancy. Forget the lapses in recollection. Forget the constant fear. It must be this life we’re born into, how it treats every newborn over and over again. I couldn’t recognize anything different from my last life, only that I was less hungry.

And before I knew it, I was 20. Then I was 21. Then I was 22, and still stumbling. Too old to be making the same mistakes. A promise of exclusivity broken again by a mysterious silence, a desperate confrontation. Silence, complacency, begging again. Only this time, I thought I’d change the last step. I let him go, and my disdain grew far more quickly than it had three years ago. A baby step. A toddler step. Something too advanced for the baby I had been.

Now I’m 26 and ripping past the scar tissue. That familiar flesh, red and bleeding. Every time the first cold front of the season comes in, I’m subject to nosebleeds. A barometric canary in the mine. The first week of rain, every year, I bleed and bleed and bleed. Stick Vaseline up my nose to help. Don’t turn on the heater or the AC. Put on the humidifier. And still, every year, I am subject to the whims of time telling me another year is nearly over, that I am older once again.

I’ve learned new motions. It feels odd to think that I’m still only on my second life, when I’ve lived through so many winters feeling cold. Even in my first life, I was told I was an old soul, too knowing for my age. I lost the comment for several years, and here it has come again, full force. I get carded everywhere I go, but I’ll tell a story and will then be asked, again, how old I am. Only 26? And you’ve already died?