The counterlife

Perhaps the only good thing about living all these counterlives, and having to go through the pain and confusion of transiting between them, is that it offers a sense of perspective. It's pretty serious pain and confusion, mind, so it's hardly equitable perspective. Nonetheless, during my latest transition between lives, I have become quite convinced about the impermanence of it all, a truth that I've always accepted but never experienced. The uncertainty and instability of one life seems rather quaint when one steps into another. And it's always the case that the current one seems the most real. I once believed this truth would guide me through life more confident and less encumbered. But of course I was wrong. Impermanence is the last thing a counterlife needs. I'm sure there is magic in living through changes, and watching the fabric of a life be unravelled into something better. Yet when it happens when you're not around to witness it, it feels like the worst thing in the world. At least if one could close the door for good and banish things to the past, there would be some hope of moving on. For me, though, the life is being dismantled before my eyes, piece by piece, until the only thing left is me. If this is how it must turn out in the end, I do not know why it bothered to happen at all.