Week 10 - Too Many to Keep Separated

Too Many to Keep Separated

(“In a past life…”)

Matthew Ryan Fischer

They loved to prattle on and on with their mindless banalities; it was the disgusting prattle of the vapid and empty, as if the sound of their sad little voices was the only thing keeping the world turning. They were soulless. Directionless. Miserable wastes of time and history. Droning on and on about their wishful fantasies as opposed to doing anything about correcting any one of the tragedies of their actual day-to-day. Existence was too hard. Existentially speaking. Much easier to pretend and convince themselves the pretense was factually relevant.

In a past life this happened or in a past life that occurred. Everyone said the same thing. They always said the same things. They had to. This was not a place for originality or uniqueness. Everyone told the same story. It was the nature of the beast. They wanted the past to mean something, and to do that, they had to embellish it. And there are only so many ways to embellish something before it all sounds the same. Unique to the point of uniformity.

Everybody always thought they were something special. They knew they had been important. They had lived an exotic life of adventure, sex, wealth or whatever. It was all the same. It was all better than what they had now. Nobody ever knew they had been a piece of crap before. None of them had ever been plain or simple or stupid or ugly or anything at all like real-life. They had all been special someones. They had all had magic and mystery and plenty. They all had their fairytale “once upon a time…”

Jeremiah called it “FLGS,” Former-Life Greatness Syndrome. Nobody ever wanted to be anybody dull, so they told themselves they had been great or famous or successful. Everybody was Cleopatra or Caesar or someone like that. No one shoveled shit in a former life.

There were red flags all around and people with damage to be avoided. Those that suffered “FLGS” were the worst sort. Maybe they were running from their rotten life. Maybe they were delusional. Or maybe they were there because they were actors. Or fools. Whatever the case, it usually meant they were pretty rotten now and should be avoided at all costs.

Jeremiah normally did avoid them. At least in his day-to-day he did. But on a night like this, when they got together in their little groups and prayed for direction from mystical gurus and charlatans, Jeremiah sought them out and played along and listened to them chirp their incessant noise.

Jeremiah sat with his chair backed up just a little bit so that he was sitting just outside of the circle. To be inside the circle meant something totally different. He preferred to sit back and simply listen. He feigned interest on the off-chance that someone actually said something interesting. Usually he had heard it all before. And he would hear it all again. That was the point of the meetings. That was the point of him going to the meetings. He had even said it himself on occasion, once upon a time, because he truly thought he knew something, and then he repeated the same things later, but then  as an attempt to fit in and make the others feel more comfortable.

“I was someone important... I can feel it.”

Of course you can feel it, Jeremiah thought to himself. You all can feel it. You all need to feel it. It’s what you tell yourself to make yourself feel better about your crappy lives. If you were honest you might not have any other choice but to kill your pathetic selves.

They were all so self-centered and narcissistic on the surface, but desperate and lonely on the inside. What a terrible cookie they would make. No one would want them for what they could offer on the surface and no one would be able to stand what was underneath. They were the pathetic and the miserable. They were the unlovable. And deep down they all knew it. They all knew the things that went on here with the group were complete and total bullshit. They just couldn’t admit it yet, and so they went on with their self-hatred and kept attending, kept pretending there were answers, kept telling themselves they were something more than they really were. Secretly, deep down, subconsciously, they knew the whole thing was a sham. And so they hated themselves even more. Down and down they went in their vicious cycle of denial and hatred and lowliness and longing to belong. As if there really was such a thing as belonging.

Jeremiah knew better than all of them. He knew a truth that none of them knew. While they all hoped and wished, but secretly knew it was bullshit, Jeremiah knew that for a select few of them, it was all very very real indeed. Not true like they were pretending it to be true, but true enough that it would drive some of them mad if they actually found out.

But what Jeremiah knew and none of them knew was that there was such a thing as past lives, that past lives did matter and that for some of them, they mattered a great deal. Past energies could indeed transcend the human body and space-time and have a second or third go of things. Not everyone was someone. Not everyone could get to be a part of the past. And even those that got to be a part would have to confront the hard truth that they were once upon a time no one important at all. There just weren’t enough important people to go around to everyone in the future. The population was always getting bigger, the past wasn’t. It was simple math.

Jeremiah didn’t know all the ins and outs of how the whole reincarnation thing worked, but he knew a few and he was learning. The soul was like energy and when the body died that energy spread like any other type of energy would. There were powerful souls and weaker souls, and they weren’t always based on how big a life the former owner had led. Some people were overachievers and outdid what their soul was meant for. Some souls were lazy or old or their energy was just diminishing and slipping away. A soul could die. Its energy could be used up. And there wasn’t always a time limit or instruction manual given.

For the select few, it was all about catching some of that energy and doing something with it before it was gone. Not all the special few knew they were special. Jeremiah was a lucky one. He knew what he was. He knew he was a built up combination. And he knew a little bit about where some of those parts had been and what had gone on before. Jeremiah wasn’t exactly sure of each and every one of his own personal details though. Some of those still remained a mystery, even to him. But he was trying hard to identify what he could before his time in this life ran out, to help himself better prepare for his next go-round at things.

When one of the special souls burst, the ripples were massive and they broke into millions or billions of little pieces. All you had to do was search out the right parts and pieces. Put them all in a room together, shake, stir, mix and match. Then it was just a matter of seeing who you ended up with.

Jeremiah was making his very own cocktail. He was a spiritual blender. He’d get one percent from someone special and another dash or drop from somewhere else. He was a buildup of little spare parts of a plethora from infinity. He didn’t have a direct plan. He wasn’t trying to put together anyone in particular. That would have been next to impossible anyway. Shattered souls were just too spread out to find them all. He was working on a puzzle that had no lines or images or references. He was just finding little parts that felt “right” and mixing them in. Maybe he’d get a dash of courage left from some long dead explorer or a spot of wisdom from one of the great military leaders of antiquity. He wasn’t building one person or one idea, he was making a better package for a future version of himself to enjoy. Right now he was barely five percent other people. He didn’t know how much he could collect before he died, but he doubted he was going to find enough to make this life that much better. But he was playing the long game, planning for the future. It was going to be a bright and glorious future. He just had to find the right parts now and mesh them so tightly together than they would find their way to their next life joined as one. His future self would thank him for all this hard work, that is if his future self was self-aware enough to realize what had gone into the creation of all this.

He got tired of listening to the babble here. No one seemed to be that important and it didn’t look like he was going to be adding to the pot of soul-soup tonight.