story of my life
(blog by smv)
Story of my life so far…
Age 3: My first memories.
Age 4: A security guard throws away my stuffed toy. A vengeful era follows.
Age 5: My first critical thoughts form and I start worrying about things like board exams and how to cross the road.
Age 6: I decide to become a writer, having 6 years of experience in living.
Age 8: It’s collectively decided that I’m very smart and it gets into my head. I become overconfident and get humbled soon after. I’m a smart kid though, regardless.
Age 11: I suck at writing. I also learn that teenagers are the worst demographic on the planet.
Age 13: I become a teenager.
Age 16: The pandemic hits, I pass my board exams though.
Age 17: Life goes downhill. Something’s not right, I just can’t put my finger on it.
Age 12: I discover programming.
Age 18: My college life begins and I adapt surprisingly fast to everything (other than the food).
Age 21: I stop hanging out with friends in my final year. Conversations become too predictable, social activities are a pain.
Age 23: Without much guilt, I bury my childhood dream of being a best-selling author. I can’t imagine liking the kind of fame that would bring.
Age 25: I finally get a stable job that I actually don’t dislike (at least yet). I’ve achieved what I wanted, although life’s now quite mundane.
Age 28: I’m this close to finishing my PhD when I fracture my arm. My tenure is extended by another year.
Age 30: Finally, I finish writing my first novel. My biggest dream, finally fulfilled.
Age 39: Finally, I finish writing my first novel. My biggest dream, finally fulfilled.
Age 6: I decide to become a writer.
Age 7: My parents are worried about me. I’m held back a year in school.
Age 9: I have no friends. All I have is the worlds that I build with pen and paper.
Age 15: I publish my first novel. Years of loneliness paid off.
Age 4: Something is wrong with me.
Age 45: Somehow, I’ve survived so far. I don’t tell anyone about my childhood memories.
Age 4: I’m starting to grow tired of this.
Age 6: That was an understatement. I act normal now, as if I don’t remember anything. Unfortunately I remember everything. Everything that I remember, at least.
Age 17: I drop out of school this time. I need to test the waters (although this hurts me).
Age 25: This is too much even for me.
Age 4: I’ve decided to NOT become a writer, not this time.
Age 25: I have stayed mediocre and saved myself from doom. But I don’t think that this will work, and I’m trying to figure out why.
Age 30: I’m living the most boring life so far.
Age 70: I’m anxious. I pray, because there is nothing else to do.
Age 4: There’s no way any of this is real.
Age 7: I’m not sure if this is real or if I’m schizophrenic, but I need to find a way to test this.
Age 9: I nicked a notebook and started writing things that I remember about the future. Let’s see how this goes.
Age 15: I’m definitely schizophrenic. Everything, everything. I’ve predicted everything. I’m not real. This isn’t real.
Age 20: I don’t know what I am, but I need to end this. I might’ve lived for 500 years at this point. Humans aren’t meant to keep such long memories. I forget the life I’m living sometimes, I remember events that never happened in this life. I remember people that I never met, that I’ll never meet. I’m tired.
Age 22: I wonder if everyone’s going through this.
Age 25: With the foresight of time itself, I am rich. Now I can focus on how to exit.
Age 4: I have no clue what happened, but here we are again.
Age 4: Drowning did not work. Note to self.
Age 4: Science has disappointed me. I am lost.
Age 4: The security guard did not throw my stuffed toy this time.
Age 72: I have spent this life trying to find out why that happened. I might finally end this for good, now, but in the off-chance that I don’t, I have a hypothesis to test. In my next life, if any of this is even real.
Age 4: I missed it. The security guard threw it away. This is going to cost me decades.
Age 4: Countless lives have passed. I’ve learned to live the perfect life, and it has gotten boring. But the sacrifices I’ve made, the lives I’ve ruined, all has come to fruition. It happened again. The security guard did not throw my toy giraffe. I walked towards that dreadful bin and looked inside…
Age 4: It’s been two lifetimes since that day and I still haven’t understood what happened. In the bin was my stuffed toy, the exact same one that I was holding in my own hands. How could that happen? Are the lives I’ve lived affecting one another?
Age 4: The toy incident has happened a few more times at this point. I am losing hope, there is no information that I’m able to gain.
Age 4: Over what seems like milennia, I’ve learned to manipulate events right from my birth. I need to make the stuffed toy event happen at will.
Age 4: This time it hit me finally. The stuffed toy in the bin, the ominous giraffe, it wasn’t the same one that I was holding at all. It took me hundreds of lifetimes to find this out. Somehow, by the grace of a power beyond me, the security guard had decided to throw another child’s stuffed toy instead, and ignored mine. An exact replica of the one I had, a little giraffe. Now I have a reason to live, until I can finally die.
Age 50: I’ve spent this life trying to find out everything about the boy. Well, he’s a man now: short, fat, old man, with no ambition in his life. He’s a postgraduate and has worked like a machine all his life. All he has done is eat, sleep and work. A life wasted, perhaps, but I envy him somehow. At least his life would end.
Age 4: I don’t know what to do with the information that I have, but I’ve learned to manipulate events enough to make the toy event happen in any life. This time I was able to talk to the boy.
Age 15: Somehow, I found his socials. I’m his friend now, at least on the surface. There’s no way I can use all this information to escape this loop. I simply have nothing else to do.
Age 25: I know him very well now. He’s a slightly weird, mildly intelligent person who lives not far from where I do. A very normal person, not a single thing interesting about him. If there was an average human being, it would be him. He uses the alias ‘smv’ everywhere. Information that would never be used.
Age 20: Every life I spend with smv is a little different. Somehow, he isn’t like other people. He is unpredictable, even for me, who has lived dozens of lives as his friend. I’ve even learned to manipulate my parents to move out to his neighbourhood, just to observe him.
Age 4: Every life I get to know smv better. He’s a nice kid, and grows up to be a good man. For some reason, he feels like a closer friend to me than anyone that I’ve known.
Age 93: I’ve waited for this for an eternity. It’s this life or nothing.
Age 4: It’s been done. I’m victorious.
Age 22: Hey there. I’m smv. I’m currently a student at IITB, hoping to pursue a career in engineering. Well, I mean, I’m not actually smv. He was my dear friend, and I simply carry his alias along. In simple terms, I’ve replaced smv.
It took me an unfortunate amount of lives to learn to manipulate events, and an even greater amount of time to atone for what I was planning to do all this time.
As I got to know smv better, I realized that he was the only person other than me who was manipulating events in all these lives I’ve lived. I can’t believe how incredibly lucky I was that he had the same toy giraffe as me. But I had to use this information to my advantage.
I feel bad for my parents, but this is the cost of freedom. It took me many lives full of cold and calculated moves to manipulate the world just right. I lived with his parents as their beloved son instead. I’m an obedient son, a good friend and an excellent student. Just like him.
Now that I’m the only one with “free will” I hope that this is the end.
I don’t know what would happen to smv. I’ve thought about it a lot. Maybe he’ll enter a time loop after this, or maybe he’s gone for good. I hope that it’s the latter.
So that’s the story of my life, so far. I’m currently in my lab, waiting for my friends, finishing this blog. Let’s see what the future holds!
Thank you.