What I think about when I blow the candles out.
If there is such a thing as a next life, and in that next life I get to choose anything I want to be, I want to be an entire day of unexpected and GORGEOUS weather.
It doesn't matter if I'm a big, glorious thunderstorm after a summer dry-spell with rain warm enough to go out and dance in. It doesn't matter if I'm a fresh, breezy, warm and sunny spring day after a long cold wet spell. It doesn't matter if I'm one of those cold winter days with bright sun on fresh snow, or a windy autumn day that rushes through an inferno of maple leaves, or have a comforting layer of fog that burns off toward noon. It doesn't matter if I'm that blissfully cool, windy day after a heatwave. I'll let nature pick.
In this next life, I don't want to learn any hard life lessons, or comprehend concepts of loss or gain, or break any hearts, or get my heart broken, or try to solve the problems of the world, or figure out the inner workings of the universe, or stress out about why I'm here and how long and what I'm supposed to be doing and whether or not I've wasted my time or somehow got everything wrong, or rage and grieve and fear and wander around lost and fall backwards into deep, aching exhaustion at the impossible, ever-shifting, ever evolving game of Calvinball everything I just stated actually is. I do not want to be aware of a past or a future. I want simply to be, for all 24 hours, in every capacity.
I want to have a dawn, a sunrise, a day, a sunset, a dusk, and a night, and I want all of them to be a welcome reprieve from the days that came before me to about 80 percent of everything that experiences me, and little more than a fleeting annoyance to the other 20 percent. I don't care at all whether any of what experiences me is sentient. My moment of calm can land at any point in the cosmic calendar, and I welcome the idea of warming an ocean of bacteria as much as I welcome the thought of inspiring electric poetry twittered through a brain-jack.
And when I end, there won't be fanfare on my account, though there inevitably will be countless tangled struggles on that one day that will be me, but I won't have been cause, counsel, or solution for any of it, nor will I have ever been assumed to be any of these things. I will be expected to end, as I was expected to begin, and there will be no lasting bother about either fact except perhaps the acknowledgement that I was a routine pattern-breaker, a break from a bad spell, and that I was good. And for those who did not find me good, then I was definitely something that precluded something better. And then, all memory of me will fade gracefully away, back into the fabric of The Unknowable.
I know, I know. I dream big, right?