Chapter Text
Buddhism was right, you thought grimly as you latched onto the breast of a woman you barely knew, feeling her gently stroke your back. And no, this wasn't some kind of roleplay. Unfortunately, the situation couldn't have been further from anything sexual. If anything, it sat at the complete opposite end of the spectrum. The woman was your mother, and you were her daughter.
How had it come to this?
Hell if you knew, honestly. Not long ago, you were around thirty, planning to have children with your husband. The two of you were happy and healthy, and had even managed to stay comfortably on your feet despite the unstable economy. Before trying for a baby, you decided to take a trip together—a chance to unwind before taking on the burden of parenthood. Apparently, somewhere along the way, things stopped going according to plan.
You're almost certain you died. You don't remember what happened on your last day on Earth. Maybe your brain is shielding you from something too traumatic to recall. Or maybe people simply aren't meant to know about their own deaths—or what comes afterward.
"People aren't supposed to remember their past lives at all," your subconscious grumbled. It had developed a habit of commenting on everything now. Maybe losing the ability to speak, move, or even see properly wasn't especially healthy for the mind of an adult. Talking to yourself was literally the only thing keeping you from losing your mind even more than you already had. You'd never cared much about psychology before, but you vaguely remembered that what you were experiencing was called dissociation.
Or maybe not.
You'd never fucking cared about psychology.
And now you couldn't even Google whatever the hell was wrong with you. Because, as it turned out, babies can't even hold their heads up. Or sit. Or walk. Babies can't do much of anything besides clench their tiny fists and feebly kick at the air whenever someone finally frees them from the prison of their swaddling blankets. You hated swaddling.
So yes, being a baby sucked.
Literally everyone around you was bigger than you. Stronger than you. They could actually see. You'd never known babies were born practically blind. Well, not completely. But when your entire world consisted of enormous blurry blobs and circles with human voices coming out of them, was it really any wonder you'd scared yourself so badly you crapped your pants? Anyone would have. You felt absolutely no shame over what had been a perfectly reasonable reaction, thank you very much. If something was more than eight inches from your nose, it effectively ceased to exist. And let's not forget that babies see the world in almost black and white. Black and white, for fuck's sake! At first, you'd genuinely believed you'd been reincarnated as a dog!
"You complain about being a baby every single day just to avoid thinking about your family," the obnoxious voice inside your head pointed out. You hated it too. Of course you were avoiding those thoughts. Of course you were trying not to think about your friends, your parents, your brother, or your husband.
Your lips began to tremble, and milk dribbled down your chin. You suddenly had no appetite.
You'd never doubted that your family back home would somehow carry on, but thoughts of your husband hurt with an almost physical intensity. The two of you had gone on that vacation together. The missing memories of your final day, combined with your reincarnation, left far too many unanswered questions. What had happened to you? Had you died together? Had it hurt? Had he been reborn too? Did he remember you? Or was he still living his life, only now without you in it?
Which answer did you even want?
Another downside of infancy was having absolutely no control over your emotions. Before you knew it, you were sobbing at the top of your lungs.
"There, there," the woman murmured gently, wiping the drops of milk from your tiny face as she rocked you back and forth. The sneaky bitch knew exactly what she was doing. A few minutes of rocking, and your stupid baby brain would decide it wanted to sleep.
But you didn't want to sleep!
You wanted to go home. Back to the apartment where you always smelled coffee before you even opened your eyes, because he was always the first one awake. Where he kissed you goodbye every morning before leaving for work. Where the two of you spoiled your pets so shamelessly that both sets of parents rolled their eyes and joked that instead of human grandchildren, they had "grandkids with tails."
You wanted to watch TV shows together again and wander through stores with no particular destination. You wanted to hang ridiculous photos on the walls, meet up with friends, and travel the world. You wanted to throw yourself into his arms and feel like the safest person alive. You wanted to live knowing he was always on your side, somewhere just behind you, ready to support absolutely anything you did, no matter how ridiculous it was.
You wanted to complain about how unfair the world was—that you'd somehow been reincarnated as a baby. He would laugh and tell you it wasn't the end of the world. That the two of you would figure it out because he was always willing to carry half your burden. Just as you would carry half of his. Always. Together, you had never been afraid of anything.
You were certain you couldn't bear the weight of the entire world alone.
"A cigarette would really hit the spot right now," the voice added nasally. For once, it actually said something intelligent. Even a cigarette would have been an enormous comfort. You'd quit smoking a couple of years ago, but your brain was desperately grasping for anything that resembled your old life.
Too bad.
No family. No pets. No husband. Not even a damn cigarette.
You didn't even have your native language anymore. Everyone around you kept speaking English. You knew it well enough, but it still wasn't your mother tongue.
Everything had been taken from you.
You had nothing except an unfamiliar woman and an unfamiliar man who called themselves your new parents. The couple, who looked younger than your former self, had been unlucky enough to end up with an old soul for a daughter. They'd been cheated too. They'd probably dreamed of a normal, healthy child—not you, this unfortunate mistake who simply couldn't love them.
How could you call anyone else your father and mother when you already had a father and a mother? All you could think about was growing up quickly enough to contact your real parents. You were certain they'd believe your insane story. What parents wouldn't recognize their own daughter? And even if your husband could never wait for you, you wanted to hug him just one more time. To see him with your own eyes and know he was all right. That he hadn't died with you. That he'd kept living.
"And every time you cry, Mommy wants to cry too, sweetheart," the woman murmured as she continued rocking you. Every single time you cried, she never left your side, offering you all the comfort in the world.
You didn't want all the comfort in the world. You didn't want her love. You didn't want her company. You didn't want to grow up all over again, survive adolescence again, study again, fall in love again, live again.
How could you live when everything you'd ever loved no longer belonged to you?
People don't begin a new life with a blank slate for no reason. Human beings are creatures of habit. They hate change. If someone remembered their previous life, how could they ever move forward?
The tears kept falling, but your consciousness was already slipping away. The one advantage of being a baby was how effortlessly you could fall asleep. Adults wrestled with endless insomnia. Babies needed a lot of sleep.
Please... let me wake up at home, you prayed for what had to be the thousandth time before sleep finally claimed you.
You refused to believe that everything around you wasn't a nightmare, but reality.