Would That We Would Have Never Been Born

the earth would have sighed a long, deep breath and sunk back into herself. no asphalt veins strangling the soil, no glass-and-steel shrines to ambition, no engines grinding the silence into dust. the wolves would have sung their old songs to the moon, and the rivers would have run clean, like laughter before we ever came crawling out of the primordial slime. the trees, unbothered, would have risen higher, and the sun wouldn’t have noticed we were gone.