Girl on Fire, Redux

I wrote a piece recently called “Girl on Fire.” That night my husband and I watched The Hunger Games, at random, casually, with Jennifer Lawrence giving her all at being defiant and rather one dimensional. I had been watching - not the movie itself, but the fibers of my individual fiction, all woven together, previously published literature. Jennifer Lawrence’s character was referred to as “the girl on fire.” Why does this keep happening? I thought, I wrote that piece and now god is laughing at me.

I told my sister recently that I‘ve lived my life before. That sometimes it gets played forwards, and sometimes it gets played backwards. She told me a few weeks later, nodding her head like a minister saying “amen“ before Jesus: “I think you were right.” I said, “About what?” She reminded me of my belief that I have lived before, and that’s when I knew that this time, my life is being played backwards.

I recently watched an episode of a TV show where they played an obscure nursery rhyme I hadn’t heard in a long, long time. I had dreamt about that nursery rhyme the previous night, remembering my dream only because I couldn’t place where I’d ever heard it, or why it mattered enough that my brain was playing it while I was unconscious. In this episode of the TV show, the main character‘s childhood self runs towards him with a little red wagon trailing behind him, finally recognizing his future version. The exact same nursery rhyme from my dream reaches a crescendo as they hug one another, all connected fibers.

I have realized recently that I have an amnesia about certain things that have happened to me, usually having previously appeared in a dream. I wonder if my life is on a loop, if what scientists are now saying about the universe is true: that it appears to be endless, but is actually ever so slightly curved, a string that is knotted at the end, and not loose, not random, but connected forever, and ever.