Poems written by M. Tomás Awada
Poemas escritos por M. Tomás Awada

A Billion Seconds

A billion seconds

on my doorstep

and I can’t help but ponder on the opportunities

they laid before me.

A third of those seconds

withered away as I slept,

so at 31 years, 8 months and some days,

I will have had 666,666,666 fucking opportunities

to at least continue doing what I was doing

or to do something else

(to act or think).

Six hundred sixty-six million, six hundred sixty-six thousand, six hundred sixty-six.

666,666,666 opportunities

to do one of two things

we can all agree upon.

With such a simple premise, we’re already living one of an infinite amount of different lives,

that share the same start.

But it’s not even two options,

there are so many more:

I can write the next word

close the notebook

draw

read

contemplate

send my mom a message,

or my brother,

or a woman I’m infatuated with,

or my friends,

or reply to a client’s email,

or go for a walk,

or look at the gray sky,

or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or!!

With 2 simple options, our calculators struggle to compute the result.

What would happen if we assume there are 5 or 6 options?

There are more possible scenarios than there are atoms in the whole universe

and in the universes that are yet to exist.

How little had to be done differently,

when my age was a month, a year, 8, 15, 23, or 28

for me to a fundamentally different person,

unrecognizable to me and my loved ones?

Trillions upon trillions of different people,

all born on August 7, 1990, at 10:15 AM,

in a hospital in Porlamar,

son of my parents.

Variants of me,

some nearly identical,

some so different,

but with all the authority in the world,

I can proclaim

that none would have been me,

and that has made all the difference,

and it’s fucking amazing to be where I am today.