Translated from Romanian.

... in this life,
or in the next...

Perhaps it is only a dream from which I cannot wake.
I look into a strange mirror with a trembling surface and see my face shining. When I reach out my hand, the mirror does not break; it opens. Beyond it, someone is looking at me with the same attention. He has my features, but fewer worries on his forehead and more calm in his shoulders. He looks neither younger nor older. I come close to him and look at his chin, split by a scar. He is taller than me. I ask him whether this is heaven, and he smiles vaguely, as if the question had been asked many times before.
- No, he answers, almost in a whisper. It is the place where you no longer look for explanations.
Only now do I notice that he has no shadow. Or perhaps he has mine. He tells me serenely that every life is a rehearsal, not for perfection, but for understanding.
- What happens after? I ask.
He shrugs, and the gesture is familiar to me.
The mirror begins to tremble again. I turn towards it, spinning on my heel. The light gathers into a white, painful point, and I feel a warmth that softens my senses. Instinctively, I raise my hand to my face and discover a visor. I lower it with a firm gesture, then open my eyes.
Before me, a gigantic star hurls sprays of fire into space. The flames pulse like an exposed heart. I am in a spaceship, and I feel the weight of the suit clinging to my body like a second skin.
I pull myself away from the panoramic window and run my fingers over the control panel – as if I had learned it long before I was born. I take off my space helmet and breathe in ozonised air, generated by the ship's systems.
I instinctively feel for the scar and realise that I do not have it yet. In space, time no longer runs straight; it curves around important things.
The planet beneath the starship is blue, seen through the window in the floor. It is not Earth, but it contains it. The oceans and the outlines of the continents seem like repetitions of an old idea, taken up again with small variations.
I let the ship move forward and hear my heartbeat in echoes that stop at my temples. Perhaps it is only a dream from which I cannot wake, I tell myself again.
In the right-hand corner of the screen, the date is displayed:
"Sunday, 15 September 2115"
It is my birthday. Can it really be true that I am in the future, in the body of my next life? I take off my gloves and open the file with my personal information. My name appears fragmented, as if it had been rewritten several times. The date of birth is the same, and the discovery makes me stop reading. I look at my fingers. They are longer, and the skin has a slightly translucent hue.
The file keeps scrolling:
Identity – confirmed.
Memory – partially restored.
Mission – in progress.
Now I understand that I am travelling not only through space, but also through a different time, overlaid on the present of the original version.
Beneath me, the unknown planet slowly turns its sunlit hemisphere. The ship makes no sound as it changes its trajectory. Only I feel the adjustment, like a slight shift of my thoughts. I look at my hands again, and every line seems a memory I chose to keep. I wonder how many versions of me existed before this one, and whether all of them, in their turn, believed they were the last. I realise that the future is not an escape from the past, but its most honest form.
At first it is not a thought, but a sensation. A gentle pressure in my chest, like a gravity that belongs to no one. Then the longing reaches me organically, like a nerve impulse transmitted through a shared body. I feel the child before I can describe him. A crystal-clear laugh and a warm breath on my neck. Memory refuses to fade.
Then she comes. My wife. The way silence made sense beside her gives me goosebumps. I understand that my alter ego's love was not an attachment, but a tacit agreement to remain human in a universe that offered colder alternatives.
I resist for a moment. I try to keep my outline, but his thoughts become mine. The border dissolves and we merge, not to become someone else, but to recover something that neither the future nor technology could replace.
I understand the paradox: I have crossed space, changed my body, rewritten my identity – and yet what defines me has never left the starting point.
The understanding does not come as a sudden revelation. All the echoes within me settle into a simple order. For my version in the next life to survive, I must give up. Not by force, not by running away. Of my own free will.
The body is not mine, I realise. It was only a bridge.
I take my hands off the console. I feel my presence withdrawing like a graceful surrender. The mirror with the trembling surface appears once more, and my face changes.
It is no longer the face of the adult who made the choice. It becomes a pure face, almost transparent, upon which the calm of an angel settles. I reach a new sky. It is not a place, but a state. I feel them again – the child and my wife – but now without pain.
Before everything dissolves, I understand the last truth: I have not died. I have returned to my simplest form. This sky, so close, is not above – but in every gesture of love that agreed to make room for another. Then, without a sound, without a trace, I become light enough that I no longer need to exist.

Epilogue

Today, when I look at my hands, I have the impression that they are smaller than they should be. That they once knew another shape, one I can no longer describe. For a moment, the light pauses above them with a slight delay. Then the feeling disappears and only a discreet emptiness remains, like a white space between two paragraphs of the same life.
When I close my eyes, I hear a crystal-clear laugh and fragments of words. Someone is calling me:
- Daddy, Daddy! I'm here!
I know I am alone in the room. And I know I am alone in this life. But the thought that in the next one I will not be warms me more than any certainty.
Time flows differently now. It no longer has precise edges. The days overlap like thin sheets of paper that memory touches without leafing through them. I feel that I do not disappear completely. That I am only close to the sky – close enough to look down on what I have loved. And I am close enough to know that life goes on, in the light, beyond me. Death is not an end; it is only a passage to another life, which I await more than you can imagine.