I live seventy-six years, three months, and a day, fade to black, then wake in my one-room flat...
...the coffee I poured before I was born still piping hot. Young again, I breathe in the dry, triple-filtered air easier than I've done in decades on the slopes of Ryōzen with an old woman's lungs.
My fingers itch to grasp a brush and write a poem, and the syllables I conjure are not broad Anglo-Saxon, but a pitter-patter of feet running through my head and across my tongue. I try to place myself in space and time, like I did as a boy orienteering on a Yorkshire heath, my father showing me our position on the map on the journey from the provinces to Heian-kyō, when I was a girl.
As the long spool of me is secreted away, snatches blossom briefly like love under the moon in the palace gardens, while officials chatter nearby in the hall and a young musician charms me with conversation, his words dancing across his lips, like the sweet taste of cider on the lips of my first kiss on the frost-glazed grass behind the pub, and the soft pulses of the jukebox drifting from within are cicadas crooning on that summer night.
Two lives—my lived, my living—entwine like burst veins on a limb struck by lightning, until one fades, spreads thin like the muting colours of a bruise, and my fingers pluck at the PastLives nodule tacked to my temple, and I place it on the table and pick up my coffee, sip and sigh.
Delivery drones buzz outside my window; summer flies circling teacups the blue of Sumiyoshi Bay.