Reincarnated Without a Body

chapter 1: tears

I tried to open my eyes. But the world is too bright after spending all that time in darkness. I can't  opened my eyes, it feels like facing towards the sun in the middle of a hot summer day. Closing your eyes doesn't help much.

Man, I wish i could see the look on their face. It must be priceless. Although i can't see their facial expression, it not hard to guess from the sound they let out.

Their face must be twisted with horror, or fear, or disgust. This woman helper's voice squeaked when she speak.. Clearly shaken from seeing us.

Can't really blame her. I mean, who won't?

But props to her, although scared, afraid, terrified and all that, she picked us up and check on our condition.

A true midwife. Someone, give her a medal please. And a cookie and a psychotherapy. She deserve it.

OK. Now that she picked us up I'm the one who's afraid.
Her hands are shaking so violently I'm afraid that she'll end up dropping us.

It was then that we draw our first breath of air.
Gasp! What the hell! Why is breathing so painful?

The pain are too much I almost cry. But it's a different story with the other head. My twin head started crying his or her lung out without a care of the world, or of me whose ear is less than 5 centimeters away.

Fuck.  Now the pain is almost unbearable. Tears started welling around the corner of my eyes.

Then I heard it. My mother's voice. Barely audible over this loudspeaker right beside my head. I still haven't picked up enough vocabularies to know what was the meaning of the words she's saying.

But unsurprisingly, there's two thing I understood from listening to her voice just now.

One,  she's glad, relieved. Mother probably think we're safe and healthy. She probably came to the conclusion that we're healthy from how loud the crying are. Healthy babies cry loudly. Two, she's exhausted. Very,  very exhausted. She voice sounds so strained. 

Oh boy,  looks like she's too exhausted to even realize our condition.
And now she's getting 'ahead' of herself and think her baby is healthy. OK, I feel bad thinking like that. Feels bad to myself.

But after that short sentences mother stopped talking.  The midwife started yelling, calling mother's name. Then, she passed us to father. His hand is even bigger! From what I could feel,  his hand is as big as half of our body. If we were to ignore the limbs, our torso and heads probably as big as Dad's two palm. Damn. Is he big or we were born small, prematurely?

The midwife took care of mother, cut the cord and cleaned us up before wrapping us in a piece of fabric.

After all that time spent in mother's comfortable stomach, this blanket sucks. It feel so uncomfortable. But all that crying the other head do makes me feels tired as hell. I didn't even cry yet I'm also tired...

"This sucks." I thought to myself as I went to sleep.

. . . . .

I was woken up by a loud noise. The sound of a baby crying.  And it sounds awfully close by.

Oh yeah,  almost forgot it's the other head. Ever being woken by an alarm clock, when you still want to sleep a bit more but you just cannot shut off the alarm? It's so damn annoying!

Am I going to have to bear with this kind of things for the rest of my life? God must be punishing me for always complaining about my noisy siblings in my past life.

I have five little brothers in my past life and they are noisy as hell. Before, if they are too noisy I could just grab my bike and went off somewhere. I could almost imagine God smirking at me from wherever He are while saying 'Not this time buddy,  not this time'.

My sleepiness went away when I felt someone lifted our body. I opened my eyes to see a young woman. She have a good look. Long beautiful pale blonde hair. Her hair barely has any color it them.  So are her skin. She looks so pale. While I said she have a good look,  she doesn't look good at all. I mean,  she look sick.  Or maybe just exhaustion.

"Hello ** babies. " she spoke.

I quickly recognize her voice. So does my other head, the crying stopped right away. It's mother, halena.

Now that I know who she is,  I took another good look at her.
Her beautiful hair are a bit too messy.  Maybe that doesn't sit very high on the to-do-list of a new mother.

She also look anemic. Our labor did take a while, and she got an incision made on her just yesterday.
I wonder how she could get herself walking just a day after such a hard labor.

I remembered the day I was circumcised. I had the foreskin on my pee pee cut off when I was a kid. A common practice in my country. Come to think of it. I don't even have much difficulty walking or peeing back then but I stayed in bed for three weeks. Having my family pamper me.

Yet, mother is already on her feet less than 24 hours after giving birth. I'm...  Ashamed. I never realized how much mothers sacrificed for their child.
Yet, in my past life I never show my love to my mother. I rarely thank her.  I was too embarrassed to do that. Too ego. Now that I can't see her any more, I regret it.

I look at halena again. I look at her eyes. Then, I realized, her eyes are red. She probably has come and look at us when we're fast asleep. And cried by herself.

I saw her eyes glitter from tears building up. She hugged us and started to cry. She must be sad that her baby are not born normal. My other head started to cry too.

She talked to us whilst crying. I didn't understand a word of what she said.
But she got me thinking of my life. Of our life. Our future.

Can we really live like this?

. . . . .