Chapter 1

So...

I was dead...

How does someone know they are dead?

No idea.

But...

The facts were clear. My current state of being was - dead.

Knowing you are dead is quite different than accepting being dead. You see, I knew that because I was quite dead, but unwilling to accept the fact of being dead, because I didn’t feel dead.

Hey...

It’s my death, so I can feel about it anyway I choose, and I feel like being dead should feel more ... dead.

So there.

One thing to note about being dead, without feeling all that dead, is the fact that the pain from being made dead wasn’t hurting anymore. If I were to be precise about it, there was no pain, nor any sensation of anything at all. It felt a lot like nothing to be dead.

I stayed dead for a long time, but without sensation, it was hard to determine how much, if any time passed. Suffice it to say that I was dead an indeterminate amount of time before things changed.

When things changed, they changed a lot.

At the time of my death, my world consisted of my thoughts and nothing else. When things changed, I was aware of information pouring into my brain. It felt like what being underneath a waterfall must feel like. The information coming to me was the water, and it basically surrounded me, as I became aware of intimate details of other people’s lives.

As my deadness gave way to alertness, the details of those other people and their lives suddenly became plain.

They were all lives I’d lived...

I WAS all those other people, including a girl at one point.

What was really disorienting was having intimate knowledge of just how all of those people – who were all me – died.

Tell you what; Dying that many times will wear a guy out.

The people I used to be had so much going on that I was immediately annoyed at how empty my current - well – as current as being the most recently dead can be – life was. When I considered who I currently was and compared it to who I used to be HOLY CRAP, I used to be an exciting and busy guy!

As the me I was in death absorbed all the information pouring into my brain, a pattern began to develop. Each of my past lives played out like a movie in my head, while billions of data points filled in the details.

My first independent thought as the download got underway was, ‘Where can I find Colleen?’ I was immediately drawn to the memories of Brian and Colleen together. There was more. MUCH more, but Colleen captured my attention, and everyone else was in the background.

As the data rush continued, I knew that I’d been president three times, not just once. That seemed so ridiculous that I quickly dismissed it as a hallucination, just to have to reverse myself when a billion more details filtered in to prove me wrong.

As the new details of the myriad of lives I’d lived seemed to finally slow to a crawl, I felt myself rushing towards ... something. My ... my ... me ... I felt the sensation of movement. As I was swept forward, I saw scenes of other people’s lives, almost like there was a giant panoramic photo wall, reflecting all the things that were recently downloaded into my mind.

Many of those depicted in the painting were familiar to me from my dreams. Their likeness was at once comforting and disturbing because seeing them triggered memories of everything from love to heartbreak, and sex to violence. After a little while, the images or my perception of them showed me much deeper into the lives of those people that seemed immensely important to my past timelines.

‘My reality is a science fiction movie,’ I mused as the images morphed from many people, places, and things, into what could be described as a series of scenes from a movie, doing a deep dive into specific events that helped shape the people I became. In many scenes, I was a teenager struggling to fit in and succeed. In others, I was a tormented, angry, spiteful man, determined to take retribution from those who wronged me, and/or those who I loved.

There was one thing of which I was certain. If life or the universe gave me another second chance, I was going to live without fear and anxiety - if possible. Reliving all those lives in my head made one thing clear. Carl – Kevin - Brian – John – David – Noah – Thomas - Angela and the rest, all lived with lots of worries.

It was so strange.

It felt as if everything started up again once I decided to avoid fear. I could hear things and feel things. My heartbeat sounded so good to me, suddenly. Knowing what it felt like to be dead, feeling alive again was so GOOD.

As feelings of life flowed through my body, memories I never had before flowed into my brain. I saw a family separated by the crash of an airliner, leaving a severely injured mother and son behind when death came for the others. Their daughter, Kim, died instantly along with her father and uncle. Marilyn Kennedy, Kyle’s mother, died within a few days of her husband, Kurt. That left their son Kyle as the lone survivor.

Kyle eventually recovered and was to be sent to live with his Aunt Jeanne Carter, his mother’s divorced sister, who was a single mother raising two teenage daughters. The money from Kyle’s parent’s life insurance and estate insured that he would have had funds for college and enough to buy a modest home someday. The settlement from the corporation that owned the jet took care of any money issues Kyle might have for the rest of his life.

After some difficult discussions, Jeanne agreed to allow sixteen-year-old Kyle to supplement her meager income, made nearly nonexistent by the lawsuits following the crash, provided Kyle was allowed to live alone in the family home, without direct oversight on her part. Jeanne was not in any financial condition to afford to live on what remained after burying her husband and losing his income, without sufficient life insurance to help her over the hump. Kyle traded his independence for enough money every month to pay Jeanne’s bills.

The basic facts provided gave me just enough information to know the direction my new life was going. I found myself strangely excited about starting over. Armed with the facts, simple though they were, and understanding that my previous lives had gone through the same transitions gave me a weird comfort, even as everything happening was far beyond my ability to absorb.

The time I spent in death ended abruptly. My soul abruptly landed inside Kyle’s body.

“Wow,” I exclaimed from the pain in the back of my head. “What the heck hit me?” Though my head hurt, I was feeling around for the wound caused by the gunshot that killed me. There was no gunshot wound, no blood, and no failing heartbeat. I wasn’t me anymore.

When I’d asked what hit me, the better question would have been, ‘Who the heck am I?’

“Kyle? You Ok?” The voice sounded like a concerned adult talking to a child. She knelt beside me, holding me by the back of my neck. Her face was a study of concern as the woman felt around the back of my head looking for injuries. Her touch was soft and gentle just like her voice.

I liked her immediately.

“You hit your head hard, mister.” Whoever she was, she was in full authoritarian mode, even though she was being gentle. “What possessed you to think you could catch Katy when she missed the high bar? People get killed hitting their heads a lot softer than you hit yours when you bounced off the pole.”

We were inside a field house. The arena was sparsely filled, but there were a lot of people clustered around the two of us. From the look and feel of it, I had struck my head hard, and was trying to rise when the woman knelt and took charge.

The woman called me Kyle.

It was all true.

My dreams were real memories. And now I was living someone else’s life just like in one of the dreams. As I looked around, my brain was busy filling in details. Someone - from somewhere - was giving me a second chance, just like in the dreams. The who, what, and where about what occurred were still a mystery, but I suspected I could fake it using the facts that were dumped in my head long enough to allow me to deal with my circumstances.