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I never can remember the name of this one old Japanese childhood story.  It goes something like this:

A young boy from a fishing village in Japan one day meets some underwater princess and is lead into the sea by her.  He encounters an underwater civilization/city where he enjoys his life.  One day, he begins to miss his family and friends from the fishing village. So he tells the princess that he must return because he's worried about them.  The princess regretfully accepts his decision to return and gives him a box.  She tells him that he never can open the box as some grave consequence would occur.  He then departs back to the surface and returns to his fishing village.  When he gets back, he doesn't recognize anyone.  More importantly, no one recognizes him.  When he inquires about his family, I believe the people tell him that they have long parted.  When he inquires about himself, the people of the village mention that everyone believes he had died a long time ago after being drowned.  So he tries to find the princess again and return back to the underwater civilization, but he receives no response.  Saddened at the loss of everything he held dear, he turns to the box the princess had given him, the only remnant of past life.  After opening the box up, he becomes an aged man and dies (I think).

This story is significant to me because I feel that it exactly represents my life at the moment.  I had left Japan twice and am having a harder and harder time finding the ability to return some day.  My princess (or princesses) are all these lovely women I've met over the years who no longer heed my call.  And my friends and family mostly are gone and I have little left except something similar to the box.  My interpretation of my box is my memories.  Now, it's the only thing I possess from my past lives.

I'm saying this because I had just completed a list of my life's regrets and what I would've done to correct them.  My last thing to do would be to some day publish them.  This list is the hidden thing in my box.  The act of publishing them would be akin to opening the box.

There was a South Park triology about the Coon and Friends, where the character Kenny (one of the main characters I deeply identify with) discovers he has a curse (or super power depending on your point of view) of not being able to die.  At the end of the story, just before going to bed, he puts a bullet through his head, allowing him to wake up the next day in his bed.

As someone who identifies heavily with Kenny, I kinda wondered if I had a similar super power.  The thought of putting a bullet through my head is a bit harsh (and probably extraordinarily painful), but I kinda wondered if I were able to be reincarnated.  Or maybe if I could go through my life and fix all those mistakes I wrote down.  I think if I were to do this, as part of my purging, I would put up my list of regrets on this website.  It'll have real names, but I don't care at this point if it affects anyone.  This is purely personal.  Also, it's not like I have a consistent flow of readers.  In fact, judging from the number of pages views, no one views my site.

However, it would be something that people could see when I'm ready.  I honestly don't care about how people would react to my notes because in this life, it's obvious that no one really cares about me.  I think that's fine these days because honestly I don't care about anyone anymore either.  I feel dead on the inside with nothing positive to look forward to.  So reincarnation is the only hope I have or a possibility to be able to correct these events in my life. If reincarnation or an after life wasn't possible, then it makes me wonder if the people who were around me would feel anything like remorse, pity or sadness of me passing.  Would it be like how they say when a great artist passes, they receive more attention in death?