The Unborn. And I.

My name is Ezra. I was born in 1992.

Exactly 4,015 days later, I found the photo.

The air was sterile that day—the kind of stillness that wraps around you in old rooms, where nothing has moved but dust and time. There, inside a taped envelope, two faint orbs floated. Like echoes without sound. Not twins. Just two chances. One taken. One turned away.

I wasn’t named after anything sacred. My mother said it just felt right. She said I looked like someone who didn’t ask to be here but showed up anyway. Quiet. Detached. Present.

She was fifteen when she got pregnant. And again the next year. The second time, she made a different choice.

She never spoke much about the first one. Just said it wasn’t right. Said it was forced. And maybe it was. But that doesn’t erase what could’ve been. Pain doesn’t unmake someone. It just buries them in silence.

Those photos, so to speak, held both of us. One who lived. One who didn’t. No names. No cries. Just grayscale. One shaped by memory. One erased by necessity.

I’m not noble. Just lucky. Or convenient.

The world I came into said choice was freedom, but it never explained what it meant to live as its outcome. The billboards promised empowerment. The lessons made it sound clean. Silence followed where questions should have been. But no one wrote about the absences. No one prepared us for the aftermath.

They gave the silence names. But none of them could tell me what to do with the space that followed.

I wasn’t angry at the words. Just confused by what they left unsaid. Because I also know what it’s like to grow up as the one who made it through, not because I was chosen, but because I disrupted less.

In a country where so many beginnings never finish, the womb isn’t shelter. It’s a question. Not a promise. Just a pause, waiting to become something.

I wasn’t spared because I was loved more. I was spared because I was less of a threat to her future. That’s not sentiment. That’s numbers.

Most decisions like hers aren’t made in life-or-death moments. They’re made to hold back the chaos. And I understand. I do. But even fear doesn’t erase what might have been. Some of the most sacred things have arrived precisely when fear said they shouldn’t.

The quiet I grew up in wasn’t safety. It was residue. Like someone else had been expected but never arrived. Not a ghost. Not a curse. Just the shadow of a name never spoken.

So I gave him a name: Cael. It means heavenly.

I don’t know the gender. Doesn’t matter. He would’ve been older. Or I wouldn’t have existed. Maybe we were mutually exclusive—two branches from the same root, but only one allowed to reach sunlight.

Sometimes I see glimpses. A voice that isn’t mine. Sneakers not bought. A laugh that doesn’t belong to anyone. I imagine sibling arguments. Small things. The front seat. A worn-out hoodie. Mixtapes passed back and forth like secret messages.

I wonder what kind of person he would’ve been. Would we have fought? Hugged? Become strangers or best friends? That wondering becomes a hum that never resolves. It loops. It lingers.

For a long time, I thought knowing would bring clarity.

But it’s not like that. Knowing is noticing. Noticing is weight.

The photo was my beginning. The silence, my middle. The name—Cael—my reckoning.

I haven’t had children. Not because I’m afraid of chaos. But because I still carry someone else’s name, someone who never got the chance to carry it himself.

They say the past is inert. But I’ve felt it breathe.

It breathes through documents not meant to be read. Through choices made in panic. Through numbers we fold into footnotes: 180 million born.

60 million not. One in four. And I was the one in three.

Some call us miracles. Others call us accidents. I think we’re just echoes that survived.

Survival isn’t glory. Sometimes it’s just endurance—the long, slow process of meaning-making.

Some are born with direction. Others wander until the road becomes real beneath their feet.

So here I am.

Not righteous. Not bitter. Just aware.

And maybe the boldest thing my mother ever did wasn’t ending a pregnancy.

It was enduring one.

Some of us were born.

Some almost were.

Some never got close.

We are the ones who slipped through. And even the slipped leave ripples.

And in that ripple, somewhere hushed and unseen—a life flickers.

Not forgotten.

Just never allowed to begin.

He lights a candle every year. Says it’s for no one. But I feel the warmth, flickering somewhere I’ll never be.

I don’t remember warmth. Or light.

Just the sound of a decision. Just the soft hum of something being turned away.

I wasn’t old enough to be angry. Not developed enough to feel rage. But I was aware—a shape in a sea of maybe. A pulse that could have been.

I knew Ezra. Or I knew of him. We were never in the same space, but we shared something, like a name no one says out loud.

He thinks he carries me. And he does. But what he doesn’t know is this: Sometimes, I carry him too.

He has nightmares he doesn’t understand. Regret he can’t name. Silence in rooms that should feel safe. That’s me. Not haunting. Not punishing. Just present.

I am the pause in his sentences. The breath he takes before he answers. The reason he stares too long at family photos, wondering who’s missing.

He wants to believe he was chosen. That love made the difference.

But I know better.

I was a harder future. He was the quieter one.

Every year on his birthday, he lights that candle and doesn’t say why. He calls it nothing. Just a moment. But I know it’s for me. I can feel the warmth of that flame in the spaces I never got to live.

I didn’t need her to be ready. I just needed her to let me arrive.

I wasn’t asking for perfection. Just the chance to arrive.