If we weren’t so exhausted from working all day long, we would go for a walk after dinner and talk to each other, or maybe take turns reading a good book to each other, the way we used to. Instead of falling asleep watching America’s Next Top Model, we would go out dancing, or ride our bikes along the river bank. Instead of drinking ourselves into a dreamless sleep, we would take a night school class in photography, or how to grow orchids. We would learn to make sushi and shrimp gumbo. We would go to the symphony or teach our kids some moves on the basketball court.

If we weren’t so knackered by dragging our asses through the Superstore and the shopping mall, we would make love in the tall grass beside the railway tracks. We would fill notebooks with drawings of useless inventions. We would paint roses and pirate flags up and down each others spines. We would improvise haiku and find new uses for chocolate.

If we weren’t so overwhelmed by all the bullshit, we would make friends with that girl nobody ever talks to. We would stand up for that boy who gets the snot beaten out of him every other day because he’s too clever or too different. We would yell the truth in crowded places, speak what’s right and wrong in all the places we’re told to be quiet.

If we weren’t so busy drinking Americanos and eating carcinogenic bonbons and smearing our bodies with coconut butter, we would perhaps actually give a shit about what happens all around us. We would be capable of once again feeling anger and joy and surprise. The numbness would give way to pleasure and to pain. We would wake up in the morning, I think, and feel it is our absolute right, our absolute duty as human beings to read poetry and write plays and paint pictures and attend rallies and cry openly at the wonders that surrounds us and laugh and sing and climb to the top of steeples and speculate about the stars and look through telescopes and microscopes and make asses of ourselves over and over again and we would drop the sticky, deadly napalm of our explosive consciousness on the dark twisted jungle of hatred and lies that has grown up all around our lazy, sleeping heads.

If we weren’t so tired, that is what we would do.