My name is Liu Wei. I am a 49 year old man. I live in Chongqing. I work in plastic manufacturing. I am alone. It is far better this way.
I cannot remember when I was Maija. I cannot remember whether it was in the future or in the past. Perhaps she is happening right now. I don’t know how long I haven’t been Maija. I don’t know how far away from her I am, or how close. I don’t know when this will end. I think I know that it won’t.
From what I understand, I don’t recognise Maija every time. I suspect this is not the first time I have understood her. Liu Wei figured it out too smoothly for someone realising this for the first time. It’s taken me a long time to share the story of when I was Maija.
I was a 25 year old woman. I lived in New Zealand. I can’t remember the year anymore.
I was miserable. I am miserable. But I was miserable as Maija too.
Hold on, I need to breathe.
OK.
My name is Maija.
I was born to John and Michelle. I had autism and ADHD, I was a drug addict, but five years sober at that point.
I was unhappy, though. Almost unhappier than I had been on all the drugs. It was hard, man. I was never diagnosed, but was told I had traits of OCD, and no one I’d ever met had the same reaction to weed as I did. I posted about it everywhere, researched everything I could, but returned no results, no one had ever experienced what I had. I was alone. People told me I just needed to try a different strain, that maybe the weed I’d been smoking had been laced, but I knew differently.
I couldn’t believe weed had given me the psychosis I’d had for six years; couldn’t believe I kept on smoking it in the hopes that something would change, but would always end up in the same position - tears rolling down my cheeks and body convulsing as my brain fried in front of my eyes, directly downloading impossible and horrifying cosmic truths that all pretty much pertained directly to my ego and place on this earth, being 14 years old at first, and all. I called them pseudoseizures.
And of course, that drug use transformed into other drugs, the hope that a different drug would give me a different result. I tried meth, which delivered a similar but a simpler and wider version of the psychosis I was used to, and gave me extreme visual hallucinations, which, however intense, were oddly comforting. I tried psychedelics, which sent me down horrific paths but always spat me back out into a calm and healed space, however short-lived that was. I tried random uppers which just chilled me out but seriously agitated me on the comedown. I tried MDMA, which was honestly lovely for the most part, but I could barely get it, and I was concerned about serotonin depletion. Alcohol of course was a staple, but it made me sick and think weird. Sleeping pills and benzodiazepines made an appearance quite regularly, and my thoughts were disjointed and unnerving.
The one thing in common with all these drugs was that they all made me think way too much. I thought, and thought, and wrote, and wrote, and I wrote and thought some insane fucking shit. It hurt my head. But it was mostly like that with weed. My eyes would roll back as different versions of myself would enter my body and fight with their own head, trying to rip parts of their own selves out of the shared brain. No, I didn’t have DID. They were all me, and they only appeared on drugs. I had a sick, power hungry giant Maija in my brain, eating the smaller versions of herself, tearing herselves cell from cell and consuming every beautiful thought she had ever had, never to spit them back out. I pleaded and begged with her in all the languages I knew and didn’t know, and she just sat there in the middle, with her unknown amount of limbs, smiling, knowing I would never get those parts of myself back. And I never did. She, whatever she was, stole them. I never got them back.
I certainly never did when I discovered painkillers and then heroin. Those drugs let me be stupid. And I loved being stupid. I could just let my eyes lid while I sprawled my body on some random park bench, absently watching the world pass me by.
I was allowed to just exist on heroin. None of the things I described and didn’t describe above ever happened on heroin. It was blissful nothingness. I was hooked. That was my drug. And it stayed my drug for three more years.
I was lucky to get out so early. Something something self awareness. Something something homelessness sucks. I was lucky to get desperate young enough, and I shipped myself off to rehab. I did the work, it lasted two and a half years, and then I was out in the world, a woman clean. I rekindled the relationships I had with my friends and mother. I found a partner who loved me for who I was.
But I was deeply unhappy.
Everything I experienced from the ages of 14-20 haunted me. I was convinced I should never try anything ever again, for knowledge it would be stolen from my head and erased or given to someone else before I could complete it. I was convinced I was the reason for everything bad happening in the world despite having been born well after a lot of bad things. I was convinced that the world would die before I actualised any of my dreams. I was convinced of the fact that any of my thoughts or creative ideas would come out wrong as soon as I tried to speak them, write them, sing them, paint them. And they always did come out wrong. I lived inside a conformation bias. Every time I had the idea to voice record a random vocal rambling, my brain would erase, I would feel it emptying. Whenever I decided not to voice record, or forget to, I would say things that would have made what I thought was a beautiful book or short film. My dreams were gorgeous and I composed brilliant music in my head but could never get them out. It was horrendously ego-driven and far too self important, but for a 20-something young creative, it was the most vital thing in the world to me. I wasn’t trying to be the Best or the Most Famous or the Most Rich, I just wanted to get my shit out because it was my lifeblood. And it was being drained by something else. I just knew it.
So I stopped trying completely.
I gained a fair amount of weight, stopped putting effort into my relationship, started making minimal effort into my job, spending my money on stupid things, wasting my time rotting in bed scrolling, being jealous of people who were successful in any capacity. I was miserable.
One day, I was out walking.
I was hit by a car.
I felt my hair being yanked by someone standing on the road. Jesus, I was alive?
Nope. They’d yanked my body right out of my body. I looked up to see a very plain figure levitating there, holding me by my hair. They seemed disappointed.
“I’m disappointed,” they said.
“Yeah, I figured,” I said dumbly.
One of my bigger fears had always been the afterlife. I was terrified of dying and slipping back into the nothingness I’d come from, but slowly becoming aware of that endless eternity, stuck alone with my own thoughts in the darkness forever. I was numerology number 9, which was generally accepted as the end of the cycle, so I knew that I’d lived before, but that this was my Last Chance. I had to Do It Right This Time in order to die peacefully. And I hadn’t done shit. I was petrified.
“You haven’t done shit,” the figure said.
“No,” I replied.
“Your worst fear is going to happen now.”
God. I knew what that was. I’d read a story once and that story contained my biggest fear. Not just about dying or the afterlife. My worst fear of all time. So I begged.
“Just give me one more chance. I’ll do it right this time, I swear to God. I’ll do it right. I promise.”
The figure loosened their grip on my hair slightly and sighed.
“I knew you’d be like this.”
“Please.”
“Alright. You get one more chance. But if you screw this up, your worst fear will come true. You will become everyone.”
Everyone. I would become everyone. I would live every single human life that ever lived before me, during me, and after me until human life was no more. I would experience every trauma, every hurt, I would commit every single heinous act, experience every beautiful moment, and I would never be me, and it would never end, and I would never, ever, rest. And everyone else would be me, too. I would never be alone and always, always lonely, and always so tired. I wanted nothing less. I just wanted to live once as myself at the end of my nine lives and then be allowed to just die.
“How can I prove it?” I asked.
“You will be sent to one more life. You can’t do it wrong. You’ll know what you need to do.”
“Can’t I just become Maija again?”
“You can. But you have to do this right. You know how hard it was for you the first time, even with all the awareness you had about everything. You have to just do it. Just do it.”
“I’ll do it. I swear I’ll do it.”
And just like that, I was three years old again, staring wistfully out a window at a sunset and a dilapidated old barn.
I’m sure it’s obvious where this is going. I didn’t do it. In fact, I did it worse.
A child, plagued with what I knew - the psychosis started earlier, without the aid of drugs. I was seen by more psychiatrists than I had been the first time around, on a cocktail of antipsychotics by the time I was 12. I was a lost cause. I created some decent art, but as I got older, I did art less and less, my emotional development was beyond stunted, and I got into harder drugs earlier. I died in an abandoned house on a filthy mattress when I was 19 years old, a dirty needle sticking out of my vein.
That figure came back and wrenched me out of my body.
“You failed.”
I was too tired to fight back, but the dread that enveloped my body was immense.
Sometimes I remember. Sometimes I don’t. This time I remember. This time I am Liu Wei. I am a 49 year old Chinese man working in plastics manufacturing. I don’t know how many lives I’ve lived. I don’t know how many I’ve got left. I’m sure it will never end. Every night I pray I will not recognise myself when I am someone terrible.
I dare not meet a woman, for knowledge that she will be me, whether she knows it or not. I dare not have a child, knowing I doomed another soul to this fate. I dare not look another in the eye for fear that I will see myself. I just keep my head down, and do what Liu Wei does. This is his life, and I have stolen it from him.
Perhaps he could have been happy.