Kripa Ramesh

Honorable Mention: Fiction

“The Circle of Life” 
by Kripa Ramesh
11th grade, Hillsborough High School

—

I was struck by a city bus on the way to work today.

Which, as far as deaths go, feels embarrassingly public.

My last thought was the vague realization that I had spent an impressive amount of my life waiting for it to begin. It never occurred to me that my great contribution to my time on Earth was wasting every second of it.

And then I was dead.

Not dramatically dead or anything. There wasn’t any bright tunnel of light. No angelic choir. No montage of childhood memories set to emotional piano music. Just the brief sensation of being unraveled, like someone had found the knot at the center of me and pulled.

The city disappeared, then the bus, and then I was gone, too.

Eventually, though, I found myself dissipated into a hazy clump of mist, which combined with a million others to form a sort of amorphous purple blob. Every other cloud of specks turned to look at me with an almost confused expression (although, to be fair, they didn’t have faces), none of us quite sure what to say to one another.

At this point, I wondered if I should maybe turn back the way I came, but as those who’ve passed know, going backward isn’t an option. And there wasn’t a door, anyway.

Then a sonorous noise cried out from nowhere in particular, asking, “Where are you off to?”

It wasn’t the voice of God, no, but a cacophony of voices of those who had lived and died and lived all over again.

“What exactly do you mean?” I yelled out to exactly nowhere.

“Where are you going next?” the voice clarified.

There was a murmur among the specks around me, as if everyone else already knew the answer.

“Next?” I repeated.

“Yes, next.”

I waited. The voice waited.

Apparently, we were both expecting the other to elaborate.

Finally, it sighed. Or made the cosmic equivalent of a sigh.

“You’ve done this before.”

“I really don’t think I have.”

Another murmur rippled through the cloud. A few specks drifted away as if they’d heard this conversation too many times already.

“That’s what you said the last time.”

“The last time I died?”

“The last time you arrived.”

A strange feeling settled over me. Not quite fear, but more like the sensation of recognizing a song without remembering where you’d heard it.

“You’re saying I’ve been here before?

“Many times.”

The haze around me began to move. The countless purple particles drifted into enormous looping currents, circling one another in great spirals. I watched them orbit and overlap. The movement felt familiar.

Like seasons.

Like the moon returning to the same place in the sky.

“You mean reincarnation?”

“If you’d like to call it that.”

I stared at the swirling cloud. The purple haze parted. For a brief moment, I caught glimpses of things hidden inside it.

A Mongolian fisherman mending his torn net, longing for his next catch.

An old woman in ancient Rome braiding her daughter’s hair.

A child in 18th-century Ghana playing in the rain.

A banker in 1980s Tokyo taking a smoke break during their shift.

The images appeared and vanished in an instant.

“Who are they?” I asked.

“You.”

The haze continued to spin. Circles inside circles. Lives folding into one another like ripples spreading across water. And for the first time, I wondered if the voice was telling the truth. Because some part of me—some very small, very old part—looked at those strangers and felt homesick.

“So what happens now?” I asked.

“Now you choose.”

The words echoed through the cloud.

“Choose what?”

“Who you’d like to be next.”

I blinked. “That’s an option?”

“Of course.” The haze brightened.

Possibilities unfurled before me.

A celebrated musician performing before a crowd.

An explorer sailing toward a distant shore.

A billionaire.

A president.

A revolutionary.

Every life I’d ever imagined wanting.

Every life I’d spent my own life comparing myself against.

“Anyone at all,” the voice said.

I stared.

Back on Earth, I had spent years wishing I were somebody else. Now, apparently, I had the opportunity. The funny thing was that the longer I looked, the less interested I became. Every life glittered from a distance.

But so had mine.

I’d always imagined happiness as something waiting just ahead of me.

In the next promotion.

The next apartment.

The next version of myself.

The next, the next, the next.

A circle of endless almosts.

“Well?” asked the voice.

I hesitated.

“Can I be me again?”

For a moment, even the haze seemed to stop moving.

“Yourself?”

“Yes.”

The voice sounded genuinely confused.

“You can be anyone.”

“I know.”

“Why?”

I thought about the life I’d just left.

The coffee I never finished.

The friends I forgot to call back.

The ordinary Tuesday morning that had ended beneath a city bus.

A life so thoroughly average that I’d spent most of it looking past it.

“I’d like to take another stab at it, if you’d let me.”

The voice was silent for a long time.

Then, somewhere within the cloud, a laugh rippled outward.

“Very well.”

The purple haze brightened. The circle turned once more and swallowed me whole.

And for the first time, I wasn’t waiting for my life to begin.