Reversal

There is no afterlife, but that doesn't mean we don't get to live a second time.

At some point the expansion of the uni­verse will slow down, stop, and begin to con­tract, and at that moment the arrow of time will reverse. Everything that happened on the way out will happen again, but backward. In this way our life neither dies nor disinteg­rates, but rewinds.

In this reverse life you are born of the ground. At funeral ceremonies, we dig you up from the earth and transport you grandly to the mortuary, where the birth makeup is removed. You then are taken to the hospital, where, surrounded by doctors, you open your eyes for the first time. In your daily life, broken vases reassemble, meltwater freezes into snowmen, broken hearts find love, rivers flow uphill. Marriages reride rocky roads and eventually end in erotic dating. The pleasures of a lifetime of intercourse are relived, culminating in kisses instead of sleep. Bearded men become smooth-faced children who are sent to schools to gently strip away the original sins of knowledge; reading, writing, and mathematics are ex­punged. After this diseducation, graduates shrink and crawl and lose their teeth, achiev­ing the purity of the highest state of the in­fant. On their last day, howling because it is the end of their lives, babies climb back into the wombs of their mothers, who eventually shrink and climb back into the wombs of their mothers, and so on like concentric Rus­sian dolls.

In this reverse life you have blissful ex­pectations about what will come next as you experience your story backward. At the mo­ment of reversal you are genuinely happy, for while life must be lived forward the first time, you suspect it will really be understood only upon replay.

But you have a painful surprise in store. You discover that your memory has spent a lifetime manufacturing small myths to keep your life story consistent with who you thought you were. You have committed to a coherent narrative, misremembering little details and decisions and sequences of events. On the way back, the cloth of that story line unravels. Reversing through the corridors of your life, you are battered and bruised in the collisions between reminis­cence and reality. By the time you enter the womb again, you understand as little about yourself as you did your first time here.

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