I asked my students to imagine a world in which they were never born.  Their friends and their families, me or the administration – how would we be different?

My students say they can’t answer that because they were born. 

They can’t answer because it might bring them bad luck.

My fingers touch the wood underneath the whiteboard and my gnawed nails come up black and green.  That will bother me for the rest of the day.

What if I had never been born?  I ask. 

We’d have another teacher. 

What would that be like? 

Cool?  Bad?  I don’t know. 

Easier? 

Definitely. 

I’m the oldest of my siblings.  My mother’s only miscarriage came before me.  She waited four months to try again.  Here I am.

It was a boy, I know that much.  Small, smaller than my mother’s palm.  She says that she saw it, though I don’t know why she doesn’t refer to it as him, since it was a boy.

Myself, I never thought I would live past 18.  It wasn’t a belief that was formed out of rebelliousness or melodramatic teenage-angst – it was just a convincing almost-fact.  I was the only one who was surprised when I graduated from high school.  I dared lightning or HIV to suddenly latch onto my ankles as I crossed the stage, but no.

It’s still surprising.

The deaths of uncles and adolescent cousins, sepsis and car crashes, nightmares and my newfound brand-spanking-diagnosed Narcolepsy, I’m still here.  My typing has improved in the years since my time supposedly ran out, I’ve lost weight and I’ve given blood, lost the fear of death but not the promise.  I ditched superstition and found the dirt underneath my feet.  I’ve engaged in adultery and then married – and I somehow fudged my way through college.  I teach children, some of whom may be destined to die a few feet from where I write this, or down the street, not far from now.

My heart thrashes around in my chest like a braying ass, jumping up and down on the amphetamines that keep me driving without falling asleep.

My jaw is still crooked like it’s always been, and that makes it hard to shave my chin.

Without me, there would be on-line superstores that would be missing hundreds of dollars in revenue.  There would be children that would not have to write so much in English class.  There would be books that would not sit on the same shelf as my wife’s, tossing out clever elegies for humanity or belief, and prescriptions for connection.

Certainly there would be prescriptions never written or filled and a car never driven, never bounced down the highway and swerved like the cap of a red pen rolling around on the floor.

I’m awake.

For now.

That’s all I can do.

So what do we live for?

For each other, maybe, but usually in ways that we don’t think of.  If we live for sex, at least a little bit, we live for each other – out of lust (there is nothing simple about it) or out of violence (another form of lust).

These have been years of waiting.

Waiting for war to begin and waiting for it to end.

Waiting for gains in equality to be made and then waiting for the backlash and takebacks.

Waiting for different kinds of prosperity.

Waiting for the next.

We’ve lost a lot of time waiting to get it all back.

Without you (you) I know what I would be.

Our new approach, at least for now –

Who we kill we speak quietly of.  What we hate we bomb and reanimate in our own image, and if necessary, bomb again.  Nothing is perfect and nothing is forever.  We just haven’t set the date yet, but there’s no point in worrying, someone else will handle it.

What are we fightin’ for?  Don’t ask me I don’t give a damn.  Next stop is –