Children

I’m terrified of children, mine. I have none, yet. They will have 23 of mine and the same number of some mothers’.

Is that all it takes? The will and urge? What it takes to be a multiplier?

Nature (God?) decided to point the human arrow to the future. It gets there through recombination of DNA sequences randomized over the human collective. Is there a point? Temporarily, sure. But does the arrow as a whole have a tip? Or is it just a stick? Or a blob?

Let’s go with an arrow — from the beginning of our first bipedal ancestors we have moved, towards something. If not categorically certainly metaphorically. We have advanced and in this if nothing else we have moved away from and closer to, what?

Be that as it may, I for reasons that don’t matter have the option at 34 of laying down my cards. To life I can say, take these 23 and do with them what you will. Some mans 23 gave us Beethoven, anothers Genghis Khan and so on! For the greatest (God) skipped every mans 23 and donated his own to a 14 year old Jewish girl. Why?

How is it that woman even for God remained indispensable? Is this patriarchy's fear? That at his core man is dispensable; that the immaculate conception and virgin birth means that under conditions of unavailability nature circumvents man?

So I have now; if I will the option to cast urim and thummim! In the grand scheme of things it doesn’t matter, my 23. Purely statistically we were bound to spring forth a Newton, Diop and an Einstein eventually. A Mao, Idi Amin and a Hitler also. In a universe the size we suspect life is bound to have sprung forth several times and places. Only a matter of time. And so we wait and copulate, in hope.

Is ours a man species; does another woman species exists beyond the stars? Will our and the other race co-mingle into yet another and another? All the way, to what?

What are the chances dear reader; that your 23 is where the special sequence of nucleotide resides that will give us the girl, or boy who will show us the way? Point us to the light, out of this deadlock? How much are you willing to bet that time and space have been awaiting some random combination of yours and Missy’s to undo the Gordian knot?

Imagine my dying, the slow atrophy through failed attempts to make copies without errors. In slow motion watch as the silver chord is broken. A-T-C is wrongly copied as A-C-T and just like that my body will signal it’s end. The seeds of death, like eggs in a new born baby girls undifferentiated womb will bear fruit. I will die.

In death will creation laugh with scorn at the man who saving his life, lost it — and with it the one in a billionth shot? Or will it trudge on, indifferent, ants under heavy boots on tired feet.

Either today or tomorrow the curtains will close. Even Scheherazades tales must end. Some where in that discursive cursive of the story of human experience a bump could be felt the size of a mole, it’ll say here was something, that could have been but was nothing.

No point in repeating ‘here’s a man who died’ for all men must.