At conception,
you were almost nothing.
A wet little argument
between two cells
about whether the universe
needed another mouth.
Nobody knew your name.
Nobody knew your face.
Nobody knew
you were going to hate coriander,
fall in love badly, lie about being fine,
and eventually become
the kind of person who says,
"I don't need anything."
You hadn't even arrived
and already you were disappointing the future.
Then they ended you.
Chemical dissipation.
You never saw daylight.
You never got to find out
whether you were beautiful or ugly
or merely unfortunate in the way most of us are.
No one missed you until they had imagined missing you.
That is the strange thing about unborn people:
you can grieve an entire lifetime that never happened.
Your mother did. For a brief while.
Then you died before you were born.
This time there had been a face.
A tiny face floating in a machine
that made everyone very quiet.
Someone had already said your name.
Someone had already bought something small.
Someone had already imagined your first day at school.
Someone had already wondered whether you would be tall.
Then your heart decided it had done enough.
The room went silent.
Your mother went home with an empty body
and a future that had nowhere to live.
Then you were born.
And you died eleven months later.
Eleven months.
Long enough to learn your mother's smell.
Long enough for your father to discover
that a human being can weigh almost nothing
and still break a man in half.
Long enough for everyone to fall in love with a face
that never got the chance to wrinkle.
At seven, you died.
Now there were teeth marks on pencils.
A favourite colour.
A monster under the bed
that was apparently more believable
than the monster called adulthood.
There were drawings. Hundreds of them.
You had drawn the sun too large.
Your mother kept them.
Of course she did.
She couldn't throw away the sun.
At sixteen, you died.
Now you had secrets.
You had discovered that adults
were mostly children with better lies.
You had kissed someone
and spent three weeks pretending it hadn't mattered.
You had one song
you would never admit made you cry.
You had started becoming someone.
That is when death gets especially vulgar.
Because now there is a person to kill.
Your friends grew older. You didn't.
They learned new jokes. New bodies.
New ways to ruin themselves.
Every few years someone would say,
"He would've been thirty by now."
As though thirty were a place you had failed to reach.
At thirty-four, you died.
You had become the man
your sixteen-year-old self
would have crossed the street to avoid.
You had a job.
A bad back.
A password you had forgotten twice.
You had learned that love is not enough
but loneliness is somehow worse.
You had bought things for a future
that kept moving
like a cat you were trying to catch.
You had started saying,
"Maybe next year."
Next year
is one of the most successful
serial killers in human history.
Then you died.
Someone found your unfinished coffee.
Nobody knows why that detail always survives.
Perhaps because a half-drunk cup
is the closest the living ever get to understanding
how abruptly a person can disappear.
At fifty-eight, you died.
You had become the oldest person
in some of your memories.
Your father was gone.
Someone called you "Dad"
without you remembering
when it had started sounding like a middle name.
You had stories you told too often.
Secrets you told nobody.
A name you still couldn't say
without feeling something move behind your ribs.
You had spent decades becoming yourself.
Then you died.
Imagine spending fifty-eight years building a house
only to discover you were the tenant.
At eighty-nine, you died.
By now, everyone said you had lived.
They said it kindly.
They said it as though
you had finally completed something.
But perhaps, there was never such thing as a completed life.
Perhaps every life
is just a collection
of doors you didn't open.
People. Cities. Bodies.
Versions of yourself you abandoned
because they became too expensive to maintain.
You were not the person you could have been.
You were merely the person who remained
after everyone else had died.
Because that is what nobody tells you.
You don't die once.
You die constantly.
The child disappears.
The teenager disappears.
The lover disappears.
The coward disappears.
The idiot who thought he would live forever disappears.
The person who swore he would never become his father disappears.
Then one day you become him.
Then he disappears too.
And we call this growing up.
As though there were something noble
about being slowly murdered by time.
So perhaps the question isn't:
"When does life begin?"
Perhaps it is:
"Which death do we call birth?"
Because you were alive when you were conceived.
Alive when you were wanted. Alive when you were lost.
Alive for eleven months. Alive for seven years.
Alive for sixteen. Alive for thirty-four.
Alive for fifty-eight. Alive for eighty-nine.
And inside each of those lives
was another one waiting to happen.
And another. And another.
Until finally there was nowhere left for you to become.
So you died.
And everyone cried for the person you had been.
Nobody cried for the people you never got to kill.
