It Should Have Been You

Sometimes I sit and think it through, and I really wish that it were you.
Ungrateful for the life I was given, I think you may have appreciated more.
She lost you on that fateful day, in one of the most painful and horrible ways.
I only came because you didn't.
Sometimes I wonder what you would think if you went through everything we did.
Would you have done it better?
Would you have made her happier? Would our family have stayed together?
I don't know why I feel this way. Mom's always made it so that I didn't.
But it won't stop.
There's something so wrong, so wrong about my own birth being heralded by tragedy.
A lost son. Two.
Sometimes I really wish it were you.
They'd cry "it's a boy, you have two sons!" instead of apologizing while you were rended from her body, already dead for days, literally killing your own mother.
And she'd cry in elation over her newborn sons.
Instead of her asking the nauseating question.
"Can you save the other baby?"
The answer no doctor wants to speak.
The answer no mother wants to hear.
The cruelty never ends.
They put a heart-rate monitor on her, you know?
So she and Dad had to listen while two beats

thump-thump                               thump-thump

thump-thump                               thump-thump

thump-thump                               thump-thump

thump-thump                               thump-thump

became

thump-thump                              thump-thump

thump-thump                              thump-thump

thump                                        thump-thump

thu                                                  thump-thump

one.

I only came because you couldn't.