The Bridge Enthusiast

Very Short Fiction - Written Spring 2023

In my past life, the one immediately preceding this one, I had the ability to determine who other people were in past lives and would be in future ones. In fact, it was my vocation, my trade. I was the person in my community who others turned to with questions of fate, identity, and reincarnation. A lot of responsibility for just one person, however clairvoyant. As for what community, exactly, I served, what title was reserved in that community for a person of my (former) abilities, and what I received as payment for this all-important service (large stacks of money? my basic human needs met? adoration of the masses?): I don’t have a clue. That’s the thing about being one life away from such expansive, death-spanning knowledge: When you’re one life away, you only get glimpses of it.

It works the same way for everyone, whether you know it or not (and most people don’t). In each adjacent life, a person contains traces of each of their other lives. The closer you are in the chain, the stronger the traces. I, therefore, contain very strong traces of someone who knew just about all there is to know about past and future lives. In this life, I can see a pretty detailed silhouette of that knowledge. This is why I feel I can speak on it. I by no means claim to be an expert. But I feel I know enough. Not everyone knows what I know about the infinite procession of lives. Nor do I know everything about the subject, but I know more than most. The fact that I know that I do not know all there is to know is one of the things I only know because I’m only one life away. If I were two or more lives away, I might delude myself into believing I did know all there was to know, when, in truth, I would know even less than I know now.

But my particular situation is complicated to speak about. It might be more easily understood by way of an example.

Let’s say, in your previous life, you were an engineer, specializing in the construction of bridges.

In this life, one life away from maximum bridge aptitude, you will experience second degree reverberations of that former inclination. Maybe you’ll have a strong interest in bridges, read many accounts and articles about how they stay up, against all odds. Maybe you considered pursuing bridges as a career at some point in your life, but never “had what it takes” (so to speak). You might be what we would call a “bridge enthusiast.” You have another set of passions and abilities that have superseded bridge building as the central distinction of your life (skills that, by the way, the former, bridge building version of you exhibited seeds of back in their day but was unable to fully access, in exactly the same way that you are unable to access their proclivity for bridges).

In your next life, bridges will play an even smaller role in your life. You might not even be aware of the subtle affinity between yourself and bridges. When walking home from school as a child, you will take the slightly longer route that crosses the river twice, rather than staying on the same bank all the way home. In college, on a trip with friends to the Bay Area, high up on a hill, with the Golden Gate in front of you, you will work up the courage to kiss your crush for the very first time. At a political rally, you will hold up a sign that says “Build Bridges, Not Walls.”

Two lives from now, you will die in a freak bridge collapse.

Three lives from now, you will once again become an engineer specializing in the construction of bridges in an unconscious and futile attempt to save your own past life.

At least, that’s how I think about it. Keep in mind that I’m one life away. In the same way that you are a “bridge enthusiast,” I am (to coin a phrase) a “past life enthusiast.” I could have explained the bridge thing better before my most recent death.

You might say, “You are in a very unique position, being someone who is one life away from a past life expert.”

“True,” I might respond, “I do not take this for granted.”

You might go on to say, “If you wish to find out who you were in your last life, do research. You were a person who knew who you would be in their next life. Maybe the former you reached out, gave clues, published articles, left time capsules buried in intentional locations. When were you born? The late 80’s? Find out who died around that time. Begin to narrow it down.”

To that, I would say: “Dream on.”

If only it were that simple.

The person I was before I became who I am now might have lived in any place at any time in the past or, yes, if you can believe it, the future. (And if I had to guess, it’s probably the future. Odds are, as we learn more about its significance, we’ll begin to hold the science of reincarnation in higher esteem.)

To return briefly, if I may, to the bridge example. It is even possible, as far as I know, that the engineer you were in your last life could actually be the very same engineer you will be three lives from now. Yes, if the procession of lives can jump forwards and back, it can also perform loop-de-loops.

That version of you, which is both one life behind and three lives ahead of the you of today, might have had a long, successful career in which they signed off on hundreds of structurally immaculate bridges. Somewhere in there, though, among the piles of your successes, might be just one faulty one, a bridge you will have signed off on with an underlying and undetected deficiency, which, tens or twenties or hundreds of years later, will tragically collapse and kill the you you will be two lives from now, thus inspiring you in the following life to take up bridge safety again, making you, in more ways than one, the architect of your own demise.

But, chin up, we all are in one way or another. Reincarnation works like that. Cyclically, with a flare for poetic justice.