A circle is a pleasant shape.

It’s the sun, the moon, the tires on a carriage in Central Park, the campaign button of someone who shouldn’t be President of the PTA much less the free world. A circle is familiar and we know a perfect circle is perfect, but a casual glance leaves any circle seeming flawless.

“Circle” itself is a pleasure to pronounce: Ssss, urrrr, kull. Snake, zombie, Neanderthal. Circles possess a metaphysical curiosity found in the barely defined Pi: circumference to diameter. It’s a roulette wheel left to chance. But is it chance that every circle bears the same ratio? An infinitely expanding number that starts at 314 and recurs at 314 but never quite at the same spot.

It is no mistake that we represent our world as a circle. Our days are circles, beginning in dark and ending in the same dark, only to begin again anew. But we view our lives as linear: baby, toddler, child, teen, adult, senior. That line is only a small part of the only story.

Today, I watched my own birth take place.

From the day I first remembered remembering, I experienced lucid, heart-pounding instances of deja vu. Not your horror movie’s “I’ve been here before…” or your blonde’s “I swear to god I know you!” More along the lines of “I saw this happen” from a third person perspective. An intrinsic knowledge of what was possible and what was to be.

Deja vu bleeds through as cultural phenomenon and I wrote off my experiences as over-excited mis-rememberings until I kicked loose the wrench. From then I knew that something was different.

Initially, I believed myself to be psychic. But who believes someone when they say, “I’m a psychic!” No one. Because there is no prophecy.

Today, I watched my own birth take place. And yesterday I saw the world end. Tomorrow, I might see any number of finite iterations of my and the world’s existence. At some point before, I too have seen them, and at some point in the future, I will see them again.

There are beginnings in the technical sense: I was born. But I’ve been born a finite number of times and will be born into infinity. Pick a point on the circle and I may or may not be there, but at some point I am, and at some point I am not, and it all depends on how the wheel turns.

There is no chance, only revolutions. Time is measured in rotations—at the end of each rotation, time begins seamlessly anew, and no one is the wiser.

Except for me. I watched my own birth take place, and I know that I will be born again and watch again, ceaselessly. My own hell is knowing that all of my highs, all of my lows, all of the mundane intricacies that I take care to mete out will be repeated. Nothing can change from what has been written and what will be written.

What I’m thinking now is nothing new, but a playing out of what is supposed to happen.