Spods, Anti-natalism, and Fleeting Men

I’m sitting in Diva Espresso with a hangover, not from drinking, but from being alive. Madonna’s Like A Virgin is playing and a baby in a stroller is making extended and deeply personal eye contact with me. Wedged between the table and the wall I found an evangelical pamphlet, and I am now rubbing it gently between my thumbs and forefingers. Free From Fear, it is titled. Underneath: What is Fear? The Fear of God. The Fear of the Future. The Fear of Failure. The Fear of Suffering. The Fear of Death. Inside the pamphlet are claustrophobic walls of dry biblical text in Arial, which, oddly enough, is the part that offends me. Arial will always be the wrong font for biblical text. I am uninterested in the inside of the pamphlet. The cover speaks to me, though.

Face to face with a pot of flowers that look like pale-pink speculums and subsequently drum up an uncomfortable medical mindset in me, I am reminded of an article I skimmed on Twitter yesterday about assisted suicide pods that have been legalized in Switzerland. I skipped most of the article itself and opted to trudge through the comments instead. There is a lot of discourse about assisted suicide. Should people be able to die if they want to? is what it seems to boil down to. The popular answer is “it depends.” It depends on how chronically ill they are, whether or not being alive is worse for them than not being alive. Depression doesn’t seem to count as a chronic illness in this discourse, as it alters chemical functions in the brain and makes everything seem worse than it actually is. I’m wondering; if objective reality is completely separate from our perception of reality, does that mean our feelings, our lense, is automatically inaccurate, untrustworthy, and invalid? Or – not invalid, but not valid enough to chronic-ify an illness and justify use of a Swiss suicide pod? This discourse seems like the bookend of anti-natalism. The harder I think about it, the more I realize that it’s hard for me to formulate an opinion because, fundamentally, I don’t really care enough.

Another baby in a stroller makes a connection with me while I am waiting in line to buy stamps. To be more accurate, the baby makes a connection with the guy behind me (they wave at one another) and I hijack that connection (I also wave, causing the baby to notice me and continue waving, causing the guy to say something along the lines of “cute, right?” and me to say something along the lines of “yeah.”).

I meet my friend for coffee. Yes, I leave one coffee shop, buy stamps, and almost immediately enter another coffee shop. My friend was out all night partying, hitting karaoke bars, and braving public transit. He looks like an old dead dog, like the brought-back-to-life version of Cary Elwes in Princess Bride where he can’t keep his head up. I look similarly wobbly, but I don’t have a proper excuse for it other than pervasive mental illness and a mediocre date the night before that trash-compacted my remaining self-esteem into a neat little cube and threw the cube into the depths of the pacific ocean. We are quite a sight, sitting across from each other. We look like an anti-natalist propaganda poster: Don’t be born. You’ll end up like this.

I tell him about a book I’m reading. He tells me about the suit he wants to buy for New Years. I tell him about the Swiss suicide pods. We briefly consider the discourse. He tells me that he saw the same article on Twitter, and he also didn’t read it. Switzerland is really far away. It’s not like we need to know what we think right this second. He buys me a piece of art I’ve been eyeing for months in the corner of the coffee shop, a small framed portrait of a black-and-white fellow with shimmering oil-spill eyes. It is called “Fleeting Man.” For whatever reason, this gesture of good will is enough to squeeze a few tears out of me before I head to work, Fleeting Man weighing down my purse with a good reason to be in the moment. 

I think about anti-natalism on the bus again. I know it’s a many-sided argument for and against the ultimate continuation of the human race, but I think the particular argument about wanting to be born or not is pretty amusing. Neither of the babies that I’ve interacted with so far today seemed too horrifically plagued by their own existence. Perhaps I caught them both in good moments. Or perhaps they just don’t give a shit about the missed option of non-existence, because it’s too late, they already exist, so they might as well wave at someone. Men are fleeting, after all. If they want to be really unborn so badly they can just wait eighty years.

At work I am forced to listen to an old man named Robert, who is a mechanic, tell me about whatever he deems important enough to tell me about for about thirty minutes. He’s telling me about the Christmas dinner he’s planning and how there’s going to be at least eighteen people there and how there’ll be twenty pounds of ribs. “That’s, like, a pound of ribs per person,” I say to him. “They’re bone-in,” he corrects me, “So it’s not as much as it sounds like.” Of course they’re bone in. If it’s twenty pounds bone-in, why didn’t he just say that? Why did he reel me in only to make me look like a rib-overestimating fool? He talks to me like I’m a little bit stupid, but he also can’t seem to tear himself away from the conversation. I wonder if he’s even enjoying himself. After he finally leaves, my coworker comes in and says, “You’re brave.” I don’t know how brave I am. Robert’s fingers were trembling while we talked, covered in slick black remnants of motor oil. He vaguely alluded, between bone-in-rib anecdotes, to the question of whether it’s worth it to be alive while in so much pain.

Over brunch the following day, I drink three cups of flat, nutty drip coffee and tell my friend about my ordeal, which sounds much less profound out loud than it did in my head. I’m talking too fast and I speak about the babies as if they were trying to communicate with me through some nonlinear vibe-based postal service about birth, death, and the illusion of choice. “My thesis,” my friend says, “Would be that instead of dying prematurely, you should have a baby.” She laughs. “If this material were the topic of an AP test, I’d get a 3. My essay would be fine, but it wouldn’t be phenomenal. Too surface-level.” I keep pouring cream into my coffee, but it doesn’t get any lighter. It’s like a black hole, sucking the cream into nowhere. I catch sight of us in the mirror, her in all white, me in all black, like a beginning and an end, the remains of a chocolate chip pancake on a plate at the exact middle point between us.

“Mine might get a 4,” I say, about the AP test score.

“It totally would.”

Monty Rozema is a gender non-conforming writer and theatre artist from Seattle, Washington. They enjoy reading novels and comics, working with children, and sitting in coffee shops. Their writing has been published in F3LL Magazine, ANGLES Literary Magazine, WhatcomWRITES, and Jeopardy Magazine.