An endless guided tour of the city. A shop which sold Mardi Gras crap. Crowns of green and pink grapes, I could not tell if they were wax. A hummingbird had been following us for miles, like a guardian. My worse mother lunged for it, tried to smash it in her fist. I screamed and everyone looked. She was such a horrible woman. I put my hand up until one lit on me, then slowly, gently, closed my hand. Stinging pain. What - a hornet? No, a dozen black ants, two dozen, I crushed them but there was always one more to crush. The hummingbirds were gone for good.
Cecil Adams/Casey Casem was there and thanked me "sort of" for bringing up the question about Christmas ants. Said they were still talking about it in Africa, still no conclusive answer.
This night is different. I come home around 4:30am to find her up and awake. I'm startled but she says she has been waiting for me. I apologize for being so late but she shrugs it off with a smile and says it's unimportant. Her behavior is strange but she appears happy and radiant. After short conversation, she says she has something very important to tell me. She is dying and will pass away in a few short minutes. I'm startled but she has more to add. She describes the process where a soul, about to leave its body, may consciously choose which body to inhabit next. Conscious reincarnation. She tells me she has chosen me as her vessel. She explains that the illusion of time has no meaning for the immortal Spirit and she will enter my body at my birth in 1979. Therefore, I am, in fact, already a reincarnation of her, destined to meet up with her when 21 years old to make the fated transfer. She is my past life. I am amazed at this realization and a little frightened at its concrete metaphysical implications. In my own mind, I make the observations:
There is truly only one Soul that leaps from incarnation to incarnation, body to body, expressing the infinite varieties of consciousness. The order of incarnation is determined by karma. For those few lives whose ties to the manifold phenomenal universe are few, one may perceive the flow of future time with acute spiritual sight. People who are bound closely together by fate/karma are inevitably similar in characteristic (personality, genetics, behavior, thought-patterns, emotions, politics, etc). This is both the cause and effect (a self-fulfilling prophecy) of being so involved with each other in the storyline of time. Steeped in the spiritual atmosphere of the pre-dawn apartment living room, my own sight begins to expand. With intuitive ease, I see the lines of karma that link me to the old lady, just as I see so many likenesses (in every category) between my girlfriend Genery and I, my friends Mario, August, Allen, even Brad Mehldau. At this point, I have an intuition that he is my next conscious incarnation (too much Mehldau on the brain?).
She sits down, smiling, by the window and a very strange thing happens as I stand facing her. I lose awareness of my own body and leave it behind (a very peculiar feeling never before experienced). I then feel myself in her body and it feels so strange and foreign like I was wearing an elaborate costume with wig and face mask. In front of me, my own 21 year-old body is nowhere to be seen. But in her body, I am her--not me. I remember my whole life as a woman up to this point. Then I remember my whole life as a 21 year-old. My ego and hers are superimposed. Just then, what can only be my soul remembers this trippy scene from the last time around. And even as I become self-aware of this, I am leaving her body in death. Again I feel out-of-body, except this time it's permanent and so hauntingly vivid. I am awe-struck and scared shitless. I float away. Dream ends.
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