I did not ask to be here

Did not call a counsel of the Gods

Requesting placement on this planet

I did not beg to be born

Hoping Zeus would hear my plea

I did not submit an eighty year plan

“What I’ll do with my time on earth”

Ripped into life

Bound by gravity

My first sound a quivering, agonized protest

Forced to breathe oxygen and eat food grown in dirt

Cultivating longevity

And at some point

Though I did not ask for it

The choice became mine

To stay or to go?

Forced to come here
Allowed to leave

Given a gift I cannot refuse
Told I do not have to keep it

“To be or not to be
That is the inquiry”

Or something

Living is no longer that which must happen to me

Shall I engage it?

Here there are snuggles and coffee and chocolate
Love and joy and peace and laughter

Genocide

Corruption

Loneliness

Murder

An endless and inescapable dissatisfaction

Why stay?

Because I want it to be me

When my children need a shoulder to cry on

When my partner celebrates a victory

Mourns a loss

I want it to be with me

When dawn erupts from night and stars synchronize across lightyears

When wind tickles trees and waves wrestle with beaches

When friends offer hugs and handshakes

When children die too young and wicked men live too long

I want to witness

to Lead

to Follow

Participate

This is where I want to be

—

I would have considered the end of this poem extremely dissatisfying not so long ago. Part of me still sort of does. It leaves me with an itch I must scratch. Somehow ‘wanting to be here’ wouldn’t have been a good enough reason to be alive.

“Give me resolution!”

I think that’s why I leaned so hard into the evangelical flavor of Christianity for a while—there seems to be an inevitable and incessant pull toward satisfying answers in my experience of that community. But I’ve come to think—or have been shown? Who actually knows how this thing works?—that, like the cliffhanger ending of a movie demanding a sequel, the tension of existing is the thing that makes existing worthwhile.