Baby

I’ve been living at my current apartment complex for almost 1.5 years.

This is only the second time I’ve resigned a lease in my short (but somehow long-seeming) life. I like to experience what it’s like living at different places and within different parts of the city – although it’s just been a single city. And I have no aspirations to own just yet, or more accurately, for quite some time. I like to know that I can go wherever, whenever, but the irony is not lost on me that I have not yet taken this self-made offer up and made the move.

But my own comfort is not the not point of the story. In fact, it’s my discomfort that is.

4.5 months ago, new neighbors moved in next door. Not a single neighbor, not a family, and not a couple, but rather a single mom and a baby. I don’t know the full story behind them, but I know she is young, and the baby, well, obviously the baby is young. And while I do not (and physically will never) know what it’s like to be a single mother, I appreciate the loving challenge it might be.

I could never really hear my previous neighbors: a young couple. I don’t think they were actually home often. The perfect neighbors.

Nearly immediately since my current neighbors moved in, I was greeted by screams of cries on a near-constant basis. Okay, maybe near-constant is an exaggeration, but daily, sometimes multiple times per day, for at least 15 minutes but more frequently an hour (and usually around 5 or 6am), I could hear it. I pay $1,500 per month for just amenities apparently because these walls are thinner than paper. And I know paper well – my skin tone is whiter than it.

I can’t necessarily complain about a baby. Not at least to the front office. What type of monster complains about a baby? I did talk to my neighbor though. It didn’t particularly help. But hey, at least it was acknowledged, I guess?

But this, also, is not the point of the story. (I am truly the master of plot twists.)

In 2020, it goes without saying there’s a lot going on. (Oh well, I guess I’ll say it anyway: there’s a lot going on.)

Sometimes 10 years contains nothing exciting for history; other times, 100 pages of textbooks can happen in one. We are living in the latter this year.

And sometimes I wonder to myself, even when I am aggravated by the crying and screaming*: in what kind of world is this baby going to grow up? What kind of world are we leaving for this baby, for our children, for the future?

*This is not a metaphor for how we’re all crying and screaming right now, but that, too, could have worked.

And so I originally set out to write an essay about this topic, and to go into the wars we’re fighting, the planet we’re also fighting, the pandemic we’re facing, the economic anxieties we’re feeling, and the people we’re failing. It seems like such little is being done to combat any of these, and although life as an average is probably better now than it was many years ago, the average life isn’t currently good enough compared to what it should be, given the success in innovation we have experienced. And at times, perhaps with the success of social media and growth of global media, it seems like we’re just getting worse.

However, when I thought more about this subject, I realized, for me, on a personal level, this idea originates prior to inception (or conception). The question isn’t, “What world is this baby going to grow up in?” But instead is, “Do I want to bring a baby into this world?” I didn’t have a choice in whether I wanted to be brought into this world. I don’t plan an early departure, but sometimes I wonder if I would’ve ever made an entrance, given the choice.

Depending on the writing at hand, the piece should potentially be relevant to all, relatively speaking. This – this is personal to me.

And that’s it. I could elaborate this further, but I’ll keep it short and sweet. After all, sometimes life seems short and sweet, and other times, it seems long and bitter.

When I look around at what’s going on in the world in the present, learn the pain that occurred in the past, and ponder the direction of the future, I wonder if it makes sense to subject someone to life.

When I reflect upon my own issues, my internal battles in becoming who am I today, if who I am today is even a good person, my ignored conflicts, struggles, and demons, the weight of the realizations I’ve come to while maturing exponentially in only a short amount of time called the late 20s, and my personal views resulting from it – I wonder why I would try to do that to someone else. Someone else who didn’t ask for it.

Life is short and sweet until it’s not. And when it’s not, it feels so damn long and bitter.