Can we choose the way to rediscover the pleasure of living, without appearing selfish? This is a story about rebirth, but it is also about the uniqueness of love.
Anna Julia is a 33-year-old married young Brazilian woman. Her profession is Civil Eng...
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Juliet went to the bedroom door and closed it, coming toward me with a small mirror from her pocket. She placed it on the table beside the bed and without saying a word, in a gesture of trust, she let go of one of my hands, which gave me enormous relief. I moved my arm, slowly, because the wounds were still sore. I waited for her to hand me the mirror. So she did, and stood beside me with one hand on my shoulder, as a mother holds her daughter in a difficult moment. I brought the mirror up to my face and was shocked by what I saw. For a moment I believed that she knew exactly what was going on, and so she comforted me.
I have not described what I looked like in my old life, it would sound narcissistic on my part, but I will do it now, to give you an idea of the impact this new look has had. I was approximately 1.72m tall, blonde, with short straight hair and green eyes. My skin was slightly tanned and I was quite thin. I never considered myself a beautiful woman, although I often heard that. I think the way I dressed helped a little, I had always had good taste. Now I saw a girl with pale skin, very white, long brown hair, almost black, wearing bangs. Big blue eyes and the worst, at most 18 years old. I asked Juliet to let go of my other arm, she looked at me for a moment carefully and then did so. On the other hand, I had to touch myself to feel if this was real if I was real. I wanted to know my height and weight, I asked for help to go to the bathroom, I wanted to see myself completely. At the moment that small mirror was insignificant, such was my astonishment and curiosity.
She supported me, I was weak. I had been sedated and lying down for a long time, I guess, besides the fact that I had lost a lot of blood. As I stood up, I noticed the height difference. I must have been at most 1.65 meters tall, and I was pretty thin too. In front of the mirror, I stood still for a long time. I turned that face in several angles to get a better look. I don't know how to describe the feeling. I asked to go back to bed, lay down, and stretched out my arms for Juliet to hold me, without any words, without any reaction. After all, she was the only one who could help me, and I didn't want to be complicated in her role. She smiled at my gesture and gently passed the clasps through my arms. Before leaving the room, she stroked my hair, her gaze was not one of pity, she seemed to understand what I felt and demonstrated this through her gestures. Juliet was not one for words, not with me at least. The truth is that for the moment, this was a good thing.
I spent a long time thinking of a purpose for what was happening. Was I suffering from schizophrenia? Was my life just a hallucination? Or was I now hallucinating? I forced my memory and remembered my parents, events from when I was a child, my friends, my academic and professional background, my birthday parties. I even remembered the disastrous and uninteresting first time with my former boyfriend Murilo. How could someone in a state of outburst put together a whole life this way?
I once did some research on olfactory memory and how the smell of each memory is like a time machine of sensations. It only takes a few seconds for scents to make us relive experiences, — be they good or bad. The intense connection between the brain and the sense of smell generates immediate memories. I tried to remember some aroma and the one that came to mind was: cinnamon. My mother used to make an apple cake with cinnamon as a child, which intoxicated the whole house. The memory brought me comfort, warmed my heart. How was it possible for a schizophrenic person to be able to construct this kind of memory?
I decided to do a one more simple test, I thought about some parameters of my profession, such as what kind of calculation I should know to analyze the deformation of a concrete beam. I didn't think much and words like "deflections by beam curvature", "elastic line by integration", among others accompanied by formulas, graphs, and drawings came up as naturally as breathing. How could an 18-year-old girl know these things?
I have never been a very spiritual human being so it was natural for me to exhaust all possible and even impossible possibilities before my last thought. I could only have died in the car accident and been reincarnated! Finding a solution that made some sense and freed me from the madness was hopeful. However, along with this hypothesis many other questions were arising, such as: "Who gave me a second chance and why? Why was I reincarnated in an adult body? Why did I remember my past life? Why did this girl kill herself? Why don't I remember the transition of souls? Who was Daniel Carter and what did he mean to me?"
In what little I knew of religion, of spiritism, that was not quite how reincarnations happened. What I was experiencing, seemed something more like a transmutation of souls. At the moment I couldn't define which craziness was more palatable to my reality. It got dark and, in the end, I gave up imagining things. I fell asleep tired of so many novelties and due to the painkillers, I believe.
