I’m Going To Die Alone

‘Shut up,’ people say. Eyebrows raise around the table, the beach blanket, the living room, ‘do you really mean that?’

‘Yeah,’ I say, the word a defiant tattoo. ‘I really mean it.’

‘Do you think you’ll change your mind?’

‘No,’ I say, ‘I don’t think I’ll change my mind.’

Further questions dissolve into the statement. The same one that always comes when you tell people you’re not interested in having kids. ‘Yeah, well, maybe you’ll change your mind eventually.’

I’m not a nurturer. I don’t have the gene. Ask anyone who’s been sick around me. Seriously. You’re in the other room hacking up a lung, and I’m like ‘Are your legs broken? Get your own fucking soup, can’t you see I’m in the middle of something?‘

Maybe it has something to do with not growing up with a pet. At least, not a proper one. A dog or a cat or a well-loved rabbit. I had a hamster for a month. Spunky. She bit me whenever I picked her up, and kicked wood shavings all over my bedroom carpet. I gave her to a neighbor. I think his cat ate her. I had a zebra finch. Then it died and my life remained unaffected. Every year at Easter, my mom brought home chicks, as in baby chickens. Sometimes ducklings. They’d spend two weeks in a cardboard box under a heat lamp in our living room, which, in hindsight, seems somewhat inexplicable. Where did she get them? Where did she take them? I guess I never asked.

Now let’s not beat around our bushes, a lot of this has to do with the fact that I’m self-centered. A claim I’m not denying. But in my defense, I think I’ve kind of earned it. We all have. Hear me out: We’re born right? Right. And we spend like, a solid 12 years sucking at life. Running around and wearing capes and basically being pointless. Then we become teenagers. Lanky and awkward, having swisher sweet-flavored Deep and Meaningfuls, trying to figure shit out. Then we hit our twenties. Maybe we go to college. Either way, we experiment. And we end up with a halfway decent handle on who we are, what we like and what we don’t. We’ve sorted through the cloudy miasma of our teenage thinking, so easily influenced, and we’re starting to actually understand ourselves. We’ve learned what we value, what kind of lives we want, and how exactly we’re going to reach it. And that’s when a bunch of us start blasting out babies.

Which, awesome. Cool. Blast away. I’ll be the first to facebook like that gummy smile every month. But here’s my take: I’m finally starting to get good at being me. Like, the me I want to be. That I’ve wanted to be since I was a teenager, but couldn’t quite figure out how. This is what I’ve been working toward. And yeah, it’s not perfect; you could fill books with shit I don’t know, and bigger books with shit I think I know but actually don’t, but I’m the closest I’ve been. I’m honing in on a moving target.

I heard somewhere that having a baby ruins your life in a way that’s absolutely and completely worth it. I don’t doubt it. I imagine it’s one of the most challenging, rewarding, and fulfilling things a human can do. It’s literally the goal of EVERY SINGLE LIVING THING ON EARTH. From hummingbirds to hydrangeas. Everything they do. Everything. It’s about reproduction. Popping out those sweet, delicious babies.

I’m just not into it. I can’t say why. And I understand how it sounds: nothing short of acting against my own evolutionary programming and self-interest. But if something’s going to ruin my life, I want the life that’s ruined to be the best possible life I can create for myself. And while that might include failed businesses and middling artistic endeavors. Bad decisions and morally ambiguous women. It doesn’t include a child. To me, that life can be worth it too.

Look, the sacrifice made by human parents is possibly one of the greatest in nature. It’s incredible. No parent is perfect, but out of all the ones I know, there isn’t one who wouldn’t give up everything for their child. That’s beautiful. I admire it. I just don’t want to make it.

But who knows. Maybe I’ll change my mind.

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