It was a normal day; I got up and prepared for another day of taking notes for next week's meeting. Drank my coffee, two creams and no sugar, ate my bowl of Lucky Charms and left my one bedroom apartment to walk down the street, where the bank I worked at was, saying hello to the elder man that lived down the street from me like I always did.
But it didn't end normally. At my lunch break I went through the back door and was met with the sight of a gun in my face before it was shot. Then all I knew was darkness - there was no pain, no realization I was about to die, no memories flashing before my eyes. Just dead. It was like that for the longest time, darkness surrounding me. For the most part I thought so this is what waits for us when we die, and let the strange noises I faintly heard sometimes drift into the abyss that was my caring. Maybe I should have cared; maybe then what came next wouldn't have come as such a surprise.
All at once I was being squished and pushed and pulled at the same time until light surrounded me. It was freezing compared to where I had been for so long. What caused me to cry was a slap on my ass, stinging the hell out of it. And once I started crying I didn't stop. I fought against their practiced hands that brushed aside my fighting for my life like I was barely moving. It only took me a few minutes to notice I was barely moving. My head was hard to move and it was almost like my limbs weren't moving at all. When I was handed to one last person I came to the crazy realization that I was tiny, like really, really tiny - tiny enough that I fit in the hands of the people around me. There are only so many small things that size and alive. And I had a good idea that about what I was.
I was a baby. An infant. A new life that was dependent on the people around me to keep me alive.
I'm so screwed.
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When I finally met the woman that had given birth to me I was shocked at how young she was. She couldn't yet be 18. And it almost came as no surprise that my father was nowhere to be found.
My mother, or haha, as she addressed herself was beautiful. to put in short words. Her skin had this naturally tan look, a light caramel that, when I looked at my own tiny baby hand, seemed to have passed down to me. Luscious, long hair hung behind her in those giant, elegant curls that held the multiple colors between chocolate brown, auburn and the caramel color that resembled our skin. But what held my attention most was her almost dopey smile and her large lavender eyes, so pale that it was only a few tints away from being silver.
She loved to coo at me and lightly tickle my tummy, never failing to make me wiggle. And whenever I looked into her magical eyes I could see all the love she held for me brimming over.
I think I can learn to love this new life very easily.
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As I got older, I noticed that we didn't actually live in one place. Every week or so we would go to a different hotel or inn and stay there, look around the town and, to me, have fun. All the while, haha-chan, as I started to call her, would be teaching me things, like my first word, how to crawl and roll. Right now we are determined to have me learn how to walk - I think I am around the 10 month mark.
While haha-chan got our things settled into the new hotel room, I crawled around the moderately sized room I came before a sight I hadn't seen since before I died - a mirror. It was discarded, probably from the people who last stayed in the room. But it got my curiosity up, what did I look like? I know I have haha-chan's coloring, if only a little lighter, but what about everything else? Crawling to the mirror it was surreal to see the reflection of someone I didn't know and have to accept that it was me.
Compared to my pale, black haired brown eyed past life, I looked exotic. My skin was tan and my eyes were carbon copies of haha's. But what got me was my hair - a cross between white and silver. It was starting to develop the elegant curls at the bottom of my hair that reached to my tiny shoulders. It must have been a while of me staring because haha-chan finished settling our things and came over to me and lifted me into her slim but strong arms.
"Let's go take a bath, Eri-chan," she said . . . or I assumed because I only had a few words, two of them being my new name, Eri, and bath.
I slept well after playing dress up with haha-chan for hours.
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Haha is another term for kaa-san (mother), usually used when referring to ones own mother.