Reincarnation

I lay back on the warm grass, letting the sun paint my limbs gold. The clouds tinted green, the sky tinted impossibly turquoise by two rounds of horn-rimmed glass. I chewed a blade of grass. It tinted my tongue green, too. Miles above me swallows soared, wings eyelash-small, tiny blades spiralling, slicing through nothing. Framed too in the green glass of my spectacles were the tops of tall trees, evergreen evergreener.  I exhaled deeply, like a dying breath. I thought of reincarnation.

If I knew I would be reborn as a swallow, I wouldn't fear death, I thought. And the thought was more comforting than the thought of an afterlife, of infinite hours spent languishing amid do-gooders on impossibly solid clouds. It was more comforting than thoughts of reunited loved ones and looking down on the living milling about mortally like dull ants.

If I knew I would be reborn as a tree, I'd die with relief, not fear. Not sadness. I'd sigh my last and assume my role as a sapling, silent, unconscious, unfeeling, unthinking. Just living a leafy lifecycle, spring to summer, autumn to winter, over and over and over. Growing. Not worrying. Not knowing, nor caring.

And then I thought, what if we are all reincarnations, all reproductions repeating endlessly, recycled souls recycling and recycling. A ladybird that used to be a fireman, a priest that used to be a dog.

And what if we were all reincarnations of the same soul, time-travelling back and forth to live every life at once? If every human, every creature, every flower, every tree, was one soul, living each life through to its finish and starting again at the beginning of another? And I was just another reincarnation of my friends, and I was really just passing warm red wine in a green glass bottle to myself, in a way, and sitting there in the park looking at myself running past, lounging on the grass, play fighting with myself, kissing myself, chasing myself. And what if all the pigeons were myself, and all the ducks, and every blade of grass  I was lying on was myself? An old, weary soul, repeating over and over, unaware of any of it. Repeating and repeating ad infinitum, wheeling and soaring into endless green-blue.