Intermission

Intermission is the period between entering a fresh body and the return of memories from earlier lives. In Poppy’s account, it is a temporary reprieve before the past resumes its claim on the present: a time of innocence and freedom that ends when physical maturity brings the memories flooding back.

Timing and Return of Memory

The interval usually lasts through childhood. Poppy explains that the change generally begins as the body reaches physical maturity, between sixteen and eighteen in each incarnation. The returning memories arrive as a barrage, though their effect varies: some palingenesists need several years to sort them out, while for others they fall into place more readily.

The experience becomes easier with successive lives, not because the memories cease to be disruptive, but because the person remembers having been confused in the same way before. Earlier experience offers a point of recognition within a change that can unsettle a developing sense of identity.

A Brief Respite from the Past

Poppy values Intermission precisely because it interrupts the burden of accumulated memory. A new life begins with a stretch of carefree innocence before the palingenesist must face the past again. Her description makes forgetting more than an absence of knowledge: it is a temporary way of inhabiting a life without the weight of previous ones.

Poppy says she has tried for hundreds of years to understand why the cycle works this way, but offers no explanation for its cause. The interval is therefore familiar in its pattern yet unresolved in its meaning.

Evan and the End of Innocence

In her conversation with Evan Michaels, Poppy asks whether the beginning of his memories had been difficult. Evan recalls thinking he was going crazy. He says he was happier before the change, while Poppy observes that she feels the same in most lives. Evan is still wondering who he will become, a question that gives the end of Intermission a personal uncertainty: memory restores former identities, but does not settle what the current self will make of them.