At age 34, I committed suicide.
I wonder when I started dreaming of leaving this world and flying away to another place where I could start over. Start new.
I was born in Colorado to a poor family as the 5th of 8 children. I should be fair in saying that we never wanted food but at the same time our choices were very limited and we had to make do with leftovers night after night. I never had new clothes. Everything I wore was a hand-me-down from my older brother. Maybe I just didn't know any better but I never thought we had it bad. At least, not until I was older.
I remember our parents fought a lot. Not only did they fight but they used us kids as tools to hurt each other. They would pick their favorites and dote on them to the ire of the other. Additionally, they would pit us against each other. We tried our best to be good to each other but we really had no chance. When things got bad we (being the kids) would often go for walks in our neighborhood and our path always led us past a home with a fenced-in yard that held horses. I guess we weren't in a neighborhood so much as we lived along a dirt road just outside of town. These days the road is paved and more houses have sprung up. One particular day I had decided to try to pet the horses. I think I may have been 3 or 4 at the time and knowing nothing of the world I ran to the fence and grabbed onto it with the intent to climb it and pet one of the horses. The fence was obviously electrified and my poor infantile brain was immediately fried. Or, it should have been but one of my elder sisters grabbed hold of me and the fence breaking the current and pulling me free from the fence. To this day being zapped scares the hell out of me but I wonder if my brain hadn't been fried a bit that day anyway.
The reason I say that is because ever since then I have had these random dreams placing me in worlds that cannot exist. I have never felt at home in this one so dreaming of these worlds felt very nostalgic in a way. Almost as if I belong there and not here. In some worlds I died gruesome deaths, in others I married wonderful women, and the rest gave me terrific adventures like I have never experienced. These dreams also made it difficult for me to connect to people or build romantic relationships. Everyone I met just felt…Off. But, I think my parents also played a big role in that. My dad treated women like objects and my mom thought women should be submissive to men. That never felt right to me but I went along with it because I didn't know any better.
All in all, our childhood sucked. We really didn’t even get one and we were plagued by mental illness as well as anxiety from the trauma that we endured. We couldn't even go see a doctor to get it all sorted. It is a wonder we made it to adulthood at all. That is the abridged version. People get depressed when I go into details about the beatings, the forced labor as punishment, being raped, and other things we had to live through so I will spare those details. Even through all of that, I don’t remember fully wanting to not exist in this world. I wanted things to be different. I wanted the money to go on adventures and get cool toys or new clothes. But that never happened. To make matters worse, our parents got divorced when I was about 8 or 9 years old which further divided our family. All of the big kids got to live with my father while the rest of us got stuck with my mother. Out of the two of them, my mother was definitely the worst as she tried to kill one or more of us multiple times when we were growing up. She was practically a cultist fanatic like the type you see drinking the kool-aid. If she knew about those groups she definitely would have been in one.
I would guess that it was around the time that my parents got divorced that I started dreaming of actually living in different worlds. To start, the dreams were blurry and unfocused. I can’t remember many details about them. However, they offered an escape in a way since I would often daydream about being elsewhere. Then I found the joys of reading. I read anything that was fictional but devoured anything that landed in the fantasy genre. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, and Frank E. Perretti were some of the only authors we were allowed to read. Remember what I said about my mom being a religious fanatic? Yeah… I am frankly surprised she allowed even those books. Ah
Having a very vivid imagination I could place myself in those worlds that I read about. I could place myself as the main character or at least in their party and make different choices that would affect the outcome or stop them from making the wrong choices. I could see how the story would play out if we went with my choices. I could love who I wanted and no one hated me. Even if I died or got hurt it was worth it because I had value there. Here, in reality, I didn’t. I was a middle child that no one had time to care about. I was terrible at making friends and I was a pervert. Or, to be more accurate, I had a perverted mind so it was difficult for me to make friends or be around girls without my imagination going wild. I tried to reign it in but anyone that lived in 21st-century America could tell you how sex-focused the male education system was. We were essentially told we had to earn the bread and then any woman we wanted was ours for the taking. I don't blame incels for who they are. Sure, they have plenty to be accountable for as a result of their actions but men really aren't taught any better. We're supposed to just figure it out. Men's mental health does not matter. This is how I felt every waking moment.
Fast forward to just before I started writing this and you’ll see that nothing much has changed. I haven’t made much of myself. I didn’t feel like I could given the circumstances. Maybe that was just an excuse. An excuse I gave myself in order to justify all of the failed relationships, pushing people away, and my own lack of forward movement. The few things I had in life were no longer bringing me joy. I tried everything. Every perversion I indulged in was an attempt to fill the void left by a lack of a meaningful relationship with a wonderful partner. I hid behind fear and uncertainty and used modern events to justify why I wasn’t making enough money or moving into better-paying positions. I kept on pushing people away until all I felt like I had left was myself. The empty husk of a person I became. I had few friends but I truly did value them. I just never felt that they held me in the same light that I held them in. Maybe I was putting them on a pedestal. To make matters worse, watching Mushoku Tensei didn’t help me out much in the mental well-being sense. I related to Rudy on just about every level. Really, the biggest difference between him and I was I had a job and he didn’t and I wasn’t a lolicon.
When he reincarnated into that world and was able to change his life around I started to get really envious of the relationships that he built. I knew it was just a story but I wanted nothing more than to be in that world-making relationship of my own. Hell, any world would do as long as I had another chance. But that wasn’t going to happen any time soon. For now, all I was living for was the last remaining books in the light novel series. At some point, I had already decided that I would die as soon as I finished reading the series. It wasn’t because of the series that I wanted that but the series highlighted things in my life that I was missing. Things I needed. I noticed that I never felt like I had a home. I never felt like I knew what the warmth of family and friends was. I never felt like anyone thought of me as anything special. Because of this, I wanted to die. I wanted a chance to get that agape love that everyone else seemed to have from at least one person. The deep respectful love that is unconditional. The love I felt always seemed to have conditions on it. I had to act a certain way or be a certain kind of person. At 34 years old I knew that I no longer had the time to try to earn real love. It was beyond me now. So, after reading the last two books and the web novel I decided to end it. I thought of different ways to do it but ultimately settled on assisted suicide from a clinic in Canada that provided that service to the mentally ill. The service required a number of medical evaluations and a reflection period that was meant to give you time to really think about whether you wanted to go through with it or not. I knew I did so I went through everything without having to fake anything for the first time in my life. I was at peace and the rest of the weight I was carrying I could drop. I didn’t say anything to my friends or family so for all they knew, I just disappeared one day. Sure, they were sad but I figured that I could be selfish for once.
I went to sleep on that table and woke up in a place that was pure white. Not unlike the domain of a certain god character from a certain light novel series that I keep harping on. The difference was there was an endless staircase reaching into the nothingness above and below me. At every landing, there was a door with a different color and design. The other major difference was that there wasn’t any faceless god character trying to bait me into something. Instead, there was this 50’s style of diner a small ways away from the staircase. It had neon lights and everything. At the counter looking every bit the part of a diner cook was a man. He would serve food and drink to the patrons at his tables and listen to their tales. I had to wonder what kind of currency existed in this place. But, having nothing better to do I walked over to the diner and took a seat at the counter. The proprietor came over and stopped in front of me, “You again, eh?”
Excuse me? I had never met this guy before.
“What is this place?”, I asked.
“This is heaven I suppose. At least it’s not hell at any rate. So what can I get ya?”
“Wait, you said you again as far as I know, I have only died once!”
“That’s right, as far as you know. Now, what’ll it be? The stupid questions can come later.”
“I have no money.”
“But you have memories!”
Ah, so that’s what this was. You could trade memories of your life for food and drink here.
“I guess I’ll have a burger and fries then. How much will that set me back?”
“Hmmm, about 5 bad memories or 1 good memory, I’d say.”
“By all means, take the bad memories. Who wants those anyway?”
“Yeah, you always say that but every time you are here it doesn’t look like you’ve learned shit.”
“How do you know me?! I have never been here before!”
I was yelling and drawing the attention of the other people that were there. But I didn’t care. What’s the worst that could happen, I’d die. Been there and done that and now that I know the worst that can happen nothing matters anymore.
“Sit down and shut up kid. I’ll go over it again for ya but this is the last time so stop trading your memories of this place! Next time I won’t even serve you and you’ll wander around aimlessly and hungry for all eternity.”
“As I said, you’re in heaven for all intents and purposes. Those doors behind you are the worlds that are connected to this place. You enter one of those from here and you are born at random to someone in that world. Could be a rich family, could be poor, you could be the child of a president or a sex slave. Either way, when you die you come back here. There are a couple of rules though. You have the same purpose in each of your lives. If you fulfill that purpose you move on and spend eternity partying your ass off. If you fail to achieve that purpose you are brought back here where you can use your memories of a past life for food, drink, and some entertainment for as long as you want. However, being reborn costs memories too. So if you indulge too much here and have no more memories to spend you find yourself in purgatory. You are neither dead nor alive. You can’t die and you will never live again. You wander the white wastes that we are in forever. You can never slake your thirst nor fill your belly. Lastly, if you fail to achieve your purpose by the time you have visited all of the worlds then you are sent to hell proper. After all, who wants a slacker in heaven?”
“So, are you sure you want to get rid of your bad memories? They could be useful in your next life if you are able to keep them past the rebirth cost.”
Essentially, I can choose what type of memory is erased but the memories are taken at random. Additionally, you can only ever be born into any world once. That’s what it sounded like to me. I also didn’t know the cost of rebirth so I might want to find out what that is prior to making any rash moves.
“How much does it cost me to get rebirthed?”
“HAH! Now you’re learning kid. That is an excellent question. The truth is, no one knows. All that is known is that you can’t enter a door that you don’t have the required memories for. You can bank memories here if you would like. You lose them for the next life so that might affect your ability to achieve your purpose but you have a safety net for the next rebirth purchase.”
“Wait, so does that mean I might have memories banked already?”
“You sure do!” The voice came from behind me and it was far too feminine to be the old guy in front of me. I turned around to find a petite brunette beaming at me. She had to be about 5’7” on a good day and no more than 130lbs soaking wet. I knew her. It was Rachel. She was my very first serious crush in the life I just left. I immediately remembered the games we used to play while our moms were at Bible study. In fact, I have a very healthy femdom fetish that is likely due to her pushing me down in a chair on one such night. It was all innocent fun at the time and I had no sexual intentions towards her but looking back on it I probably would have been very turned on if I had more sense as a kid.
“Rachel?!” I asked incredulously. “What are you doing here? I mean besides the obvious dead part.”
“Time moves differently here. By the time I found out about your suicide, I was already married with a few kids. I didn’t die for another 30 years. I went nice and peacefully in my sleep after having a loving and fulfilling life. More importantly, why did you commit suicide?!”
Rachel claimed a stool next to me at the counter as she waited for my answer.
It seems like 30 or more years have passed since I died on Earth. Since I haven’t seen my siblings or friends from that life I have to assume that they either fulfilled their purpose and moved on, got reborn, or are already in hell. That’s a sobering thought.
“Hmmm…. I was alone. I didn’t find the love I was looking for and couldn’t live with myself. Literally.”
“Ah yes, crack the morbid jokes… Well, since you ended up that way I guess that your memories of me got locked in the vault or were used to pay for the rebirth. We had promised to meet and be together when we were here last. I really tried to get you to notice but you were always too scared or clueless to do anything. I kept the necklace you made for me though. Had it buried with me.”
Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.
Figures. I was abysmally too timid and scared in that last life. I could have done more to get out of my shell but the trauma I endured at the hands of my parents and those around me made me not want to hurt others or be hurt by others so I had closed myself off. I had always thought about her though.
“You know,” I began. “I tried to find you later in my life. I figured you had probably gotten married already but I always hoped that we would meet somehow and I could tell you how I felt.”
“At least you kept those memories I see. Geez… Making me live till old age with some other random dude. I mean, I loved him but I never felt right with him. And my name isn’t really Rachel. Sure, it was Rachel in that life but my name is Naomi.”
Turning to the man behind the counter she said, “Bob! Get this doofus his memories already.”
Wait, this dude’s name is Bob?!
“Yeah, yeah. I was waiting for him to ask me himself, you know.”
Turning to a vault-like contraption that looked like it doubled as a Keurig machine, he placed a mug under the spout and started turning the vault handle. A purple-ish liquid oozed its way into the mug until it had filled it. Grabbing the mug from the machine he turned and placed it in front of me.
“I can’t say that everyone loves the taste but if you want your memories back you gotta drink that.”
Drink a strange purple liquid that tastes bad and get some miraculous effects… Where have I heard that before?
“Naomi, I take it you want yours back as well?”
“Yeah! You know me, gotta mix them up every time so I can deposit all the important stuff.”
The voice belonged to Rachel which kinda surprised me. I mean, it had been over 20 years since I spoke to her but I was positive that her name was Rachel. Guess I just gotta ask.
“Uh, Rachel? Since when is your name Naomi?”
“Just drink your juice, Al, it will explain everything.”
She sounded exasperated. So I took one last look at the concoction sitting before me and grimaced as I resolved myself to down it in one go. How’d it taste? Well, I will let Lulu from League of Legends sum that up for me, “That tasted Purple!” Yup. Well put, Lulu. That definitely tasted purple. Purple in this case tastes like wax with a hint of lavender. Gag. But, I didn’t have time to really process whether or not I actually found the taste revolting or not because I had a god-tier head rush hit me followed by a wall of images that flooded my brain like a tsunami.
My name, my real name is Alexander. No last name came to mind so I had either elected to forget it or I never had it in the first place. Naomi was a childhood friend from my first life on a world that I had elected to forget and instead kept only the best memories of our time there. We were young and orphaned. We were living in the woods after having run away from the orphanage. We survived by gathering mushrooms berries and roots. Oh, yeah. I should probably mention that the time period seemed to be right around medieval times in the modern world. But you probably figured that out. We were a good team. We crafted our own tree house to keep us away from the roaming animals and any intelligent life that might pass through the woods. We also crafted our own crude weapons from sharpened flint and strong branches. These spears allowed us to fish in shallow areas as well as hunt deer and other wild game. We always ate where we killed and we always killed a half day's walk away from our home just to make it difficult to find us. We had lived this way for several years. Just the two of us. I can’t remember why we were in the orphanage in the first place but I also really didn’t care. I had Naomi and she had me. That’s all we needed.
All good things, as they say. We were out hunting one day and had gotten a bit too relaxed in our efforts to remain hidden. We stumbled into a group of thugs that had just killed a noble and his wife. Neither of us had seen death firsthand. Especially not in that graphic of detail. We were stunned and before we knew it we were standing side by side looking at the very diner that we were sitting at now. I must have traded in the memories of what had transpired after we stumbled on the ambush. I can’t imagine that they were pleasant. After we got our bearings and learned what we could from ‘ol Bob here we decided to save the best memories of our time in that first life. I had saved the ambush memory so that I could hopefully avoid that mistake in the next life.
Since we were always together we decided we would tackle each life together and save the best memories of each life as we worked towards achieving our purposes. We had figured that our purposes were likely intertwined since we had ended up together in the first place. But, as you can imagine, intentionally meeting up in these new worlds proved difficult. We had been through over one hundred reincarnations together. Sometimes we would find each other right away. Other times we went our whole life without even meeting each other. There was apparently one time when we were going to be born to the same family but our village was raided and I ended up dying in the womb when our mother was gored by a spear as she tried to flee. I can see why Naomi was exasperated. Comparatively speaking, my most recent life could have been significantly worse.
“So Al, now that you’re back, care to explain what happened and why you didn’t recognize me on earth?”
Naomi had just finished her potion and her head was hanging over the mug. She sounded sad now. Like I had betrayed her. The fact of the matter was, I accidentally deposited the memories of us here at Bob’s Diner in the bank so I went my entire last life having missed my chance to be with her. Figures. She had tried hard too. Even after her family moved and my family imploded she had tried to keep track of me. But eventually, she had to enjoy the life that was given to her and started living for herself. I can’t really blame her. I would have done the same thing.
“I’m sorry Naomi, I guess I got a little too excited about meeting you in that life that I accidentally deposited all of my memories of us.”
Now, you may be wondering how that works. Like, wouldn’t I just forget her the moment they were deposited? Ho ho! Let Sensei Al teach you a thing or two. And yes, I realize how overused this sensei trope is but I like it so you just gotta deal with it.
Since the space we are currently in doesn’t affect time or space the only memories we lose are the ones that we spend. If a memory is stored in the bank then you can access it the entire time you are here as long as you had that memory when you arrived. Once you pass through a door into a new life all of the memories that are stored can’t be brought with you. So you gotta be careful if you want to bring memories back with you. Even if they are deposited since you still have access to them you may end up thinking as I did I still had them when in fact I did not. So we both walked through the Earth door thinking we had the memories we needed to identify each other but only one of us actually did. So I ended up just wasting that world. No wonder I had committed suicide.
Back to the plot. Naomi was dejected and hurt because not only did I not remember her but I had also killed myself in that life. Something I hadn’t done in any prior life. She felt that I had abandoned her. I gotta do better man. Next time she may not wait for me. Now that I had her and knew about it I resolved myself to never letting her go again.
I put my arm around her and pulled her close. As close as the stools allowed us at any rate. I felt confident doing that given what I had learned when I got my memories back. She responded by laying her head on my shoulder. It was an awkward position and could not have been comfortable for her but in that moment the physical touch was more important.
“I’m sorry, Naomi. I wasn’t paying attention. I would have given anything to be with you in that last life. I was alone for all of it. I had friends and family but it always felt like I was the oddball. I never felt the warmth that I feel now after remembering who you are to me. I have no excuses. I hurt you and I am sorry.”
We sat there holding each other for a few more moments. Naomi was crying quietly. I could feel her shuddering. How long has it been since I last held a woman? 6 years? I shouldn’t have been happy at this moment but I couldn't help it. It felt so good knowing that someone loved me. It felt good to hold her in my arms. I found the warmth that I was missing while on Earth. I didn’t want it to end even if it meant her crying more. I was being selfish and I was disgusted with myself.
“Hey Naomi, in all of the lives that we lived together, I never stopped loving you. Even on earth, I was smitten with Rachel. I thought about you a lot and tried to find you later on before I died. I never found you. I know it sounds crazy but my soul was telling me that I had messed up by not confessing earlier. I know hearing that doesn’t make up for what I did but I hope that you’ll forgive me anyway. I don’t want to go another lifetime without you.”
Naomi pulled away from the embrace leaving me feeling like even the apology wasn’t enough. But I had nothing more I could do.
“Alright, I’ll forgive you.” She planted a kiss on my cheek. I wanted to pull her to me and kiss her passionately but as much newly remembered self-confidence as I had now, doing an act like that in public still scared me. I think she could tell though. She stood up from her stool and turned to face her. She straddled my lap and pulled my lips to hers. We wrapped ourselves around each other as we savored the first kiss we had shared in a lifetime. The kiss left us both out of breath so we sat there with our heads together just enjoying the moment. Guess you can still get aroused in heaven. Screw your earth religions that promote saving sex for marriage! Even heaven doesn’t work that way! Not that we had a bed to do anything on. It didn’t matter. Sometimes the best intimacy is just passionately being with the person that means the most to you.
“Ah, hem!” In our passion, we had completely forgotten about Bob and the payments for our meals which were now cold. “If you are done we still have a tab to settle.”
Ah, right. About that. Turns out that the naive thought I had about how paying with memories takes memories at random was completely inaccurate. You could choose which memories were surrendered. Payment worked like this, you decided what memories you wanted to surrender then Bob would place his hand on your head. After that all you had to do was think of those memories and they would disappear. Of course, not all memories are active memories so you could choose to just get rid of those. The downside to that is, they could contain information that could help you in the next life. And, as you cleared up active memories latent memories would become active. Your brain stores everything that you ever experienced and catalogs those experiences as memories. Latent memories are pushed to the back and active memories stay up front. It’s kind of like a dusty records room that you might see in a show. So there definitely was a gamble to be had when paying with latent memories. Good thing for me, I didn’t especially want any of my memories from my earthly life. I’d keep the ones I have of Rachel. Those are nice.
As we cleared our tab I was expecting to feel a sudden loss or think that something was missing. I didn’t. I just forgot about what I forgot about if that makes sense. I could keep the memory of how I paid but not what the payment was. Essentially, I knew that I had paid by way of 5 bad memories. I had chosen them because I didn’t see any way a lesson could be learned from them but as for the memories themselves, I forgot them so I can’t tell you what they were.
After paying, Naomi and I spent some time chatting about our past life and what we wanted to do next. There was no way of telling what door went to what world or what challenges lay in that world so our best plan of attack had always been to choose at random and use memories that served no purpose. For instance, she mentioned that while she truly loved the man she ended up with in our previous life, her memories of him were not important so she would be using those memories. I on the other hand was not very attached to anything in my last life so I would be using everything except memories of life lessons I learned. I would definitely be getting rid of some of the major trauma-related memories so that I could move forward in this next life. After talking about it we sat quietly holding each other again. It may take decades for us to find each other in the next life so we wanted to spend as much time as we could afford before moving on. Technically, we could just stay here indefinitely but neither of us especially wanted to end up as a ‘husk’. A husk is what I had been calling the wandering people who had trapped themselves here and had no more memories to spare. Personally, I think I would rather suffer the fires of hell than be trapped in a void with no memories and no way to eat, drink, or die. That sounded like hell to me so I can’t imagine that the actual hell was any worse than that.
Eventually, we understood that we had to move on. We said our farewells to Bob and his diner and began ascending the stairs looking for doors. It was here that I saw some doors were dark as if covered in a shadow. Other doors were bright and warm. The remaining doors were covered in chains and their padlock was in the shape of a skull. It was no big task to realize that I had already lived and died beyond these doors. We climbed the stairs aimlessly since our choice would be mostly arbitrary and settled on a door that was hundreds of feet above the diner. Looking down off the side of the stairs you could barely make out the people visiting the diner or climbing or descending the stairs. The door before us was the color of sand. The type of sand that you might find in the Sahara and not the clean white sand that you would find at a beach.
“Well, this is it I guess.” Naomi was gripping my hand tightly. “Be sure to find me this time. I will be waiting for you and doing my best to find you too.”
“I promise to find you. No matter what it takes. Everything else will be secondary.”
We shared one last embrace followed by the sweetest kiss that I remember having in any of my lives. As tears fell down our faces hand in hand we reached out simultaneously and placed our hands on the door. In unison we spoke the words to sacrifice our memories for our new life, “By the lives I have lived, I swear to cherish this new life. I sacrifice my memories in death to begin life anew.”
The door began to glow brighter until we were blinded by a golden light. The next thing I knew I no longer felt the warmth of Naomi’s hand in mine and darkness had enveloped me. I don’t know how long I was in that darkness but as I stretched out my arms I felt contained within a rubber wall. So this is how a fetus feels. Eventually, I began to hear voices that were muffled as if coming from a different room. Not surprisingly, they weren’t speaking English or anything I recognized from my previous lives. I started feeling a force pulling me and the space around me began getting tighter and tighter until I felt like my bones would break from the force.
I was being born.