#thesideshow June 5th 2016 The Evermind by Faris Naimi

The last thing that he remembered was the car crash. Or was it the image of his ex wife holding up a gun to him? Or was it a suicide? His mind was flooded with images of thousands of deaths. His deaths. That was when he opened his eyes.

All that he could see was white space all around him. And all that he could do is see. He couldn’t feel anything. He had no body. Merely a floating consciousness in white space where he couldn’t determine which way was down or which way was up. That was when he remembered.

Before, all that he could remember were his deaths. But now he remembered his lives. Billions upon billions of lifetimes flowed into his mind like rushing streams into a mental estuary, where the tides of his past lives settled their way into his stream of consciousness. This was the point in the process in which he could reflect and think with all of the memories of his past lives. He remembered when he had discovered fire so many years ago. He remembered when he was nailed to that cross. Then he remembered when he nailed that man to that cross. Then, he remembered when he prayed in the church that was devoted to that man years later. He remembered every period of time in which he was every human who had ever lived. That was when he thought.

He thought about what he would choose to be in his next life. A hero? A villain? A martyr or a man who would worship that martyr? He could choose to reincarnate into any human in any point of time. And he would continue to do so until the end of man, if it ever came to that. He had an image in his endless mind. A woman. He focused on the details and began to project it into the empty white space of his consciousness. That was when he felt.

Constrictions began to form around his boundless human mind. The only human mind that there has ever been. A body, a time, and a place formed around him. This was the point in the process in which he always wondered to himself. Was this world that he kept reincarnating into real? Earth. Or was he still in his endless mind, experiencing something images and sensations that his own mind produced? There were too many unknowns in the process. The process of living. But his mind was drawn away from those thoughts. He was forming. His memories were erasing. For now. He heard the sounds of a hospital room which this life had never heard before and couldn’t understand in this young stage. That was when he opened his eyes.