would you miss me today if i met you tomorrow?

i have never once wished that i was dead, at least i'm 99.99% sure i haven't. and if i did, i wasn't being serious. see, i'm too afraid of dying to actually wish it to happen, no matter what is going on in the world. well, not the actual dying itself part, but everything that happens afterwards because, you see, i believe in life after death, and it scares me more than anything else. i have, however, often wished that i was never born. and no, this is not a post that will be discussing any depressed feelings or hatred or anything like that. but whenever i happen to mention the fact that, if given the choice, i probably would have preferred to skip the whole living thing, someone will sneeze the it's a wonderful life crap all over me.

don't get me wrong, i love it's a wonderful life as much as the next person. but while i think it's a great movie, i don't take any great life lessons from it. when someone tells me something like, if you were never born then no one would have ran to the old man with the ladder to save chang from the well and he would have died, i just say that, if i was never born, chang probably wouldn't have been playing around the well at all. what kind of kid chooses to spend a day running around a well alone? anyway, if there was no me, then chang would have been the first son. he would have been named tikitikitembo...etc. he would be better looked after. who knows? maybe with the money saved from only having one child, my mother wouldn't need to do laundry by the river, and she could sit with him. maybe they wouldn't live where we lived. everything would be completely different. you can't ask who would do the things i did, because those things probably wouldn't ever happen or need to be done.

when someone says, but if you were never born, who would romeo fall in love with? the answer is simple. well, rosaline, of course. that relationship would have actually stood a chance, and maybe the story wouldn't have ended with a double funeral. no, he wouldn't be pining over me all day, because i would have never existed. he wouldn't know me. i don't think i believe the whole thing about missing people before you know them. i think that a void in a person's life is not something that can only be filled with one specific person. maybe not everyone can fill it, but if i'm not here, there are at least ten other people that fit the specifications. people are only unique because you generally don't meet the handful of strangers living around the world that are exactly like them.

the worst thing people say is, but people will miss you, and you'll miss them. i have to wonder if these people understand the concept of never being born. you do not miss someone that never existed. and, if you don't exist, you can't miss anyone. i have never once missed my third brother. you know why? because i have no third brother. he doesn't miss me either, though, so we're cool. i have never once missed the years i spent in france, simply because i have never been to france in my entire life.

i'm not trying to belittle anyone here, honestly, and if you think that if you were never born then there would be a you-shaped void in the world, well, maybe there would be. who am i to tell you differently? but don't try and be my guardian angel. next time a bell rings, you won't be getting your wings, so please stop trying.

*Would You Miss Me - Amy Kuney