Dan made his way to the front of the line and dropped his slip in the lottery basket. Today, he was feeling good. He hadn’t been alive since 1434, but every year, more and more people were born, and his chances got better.

 “Oi, Dan, putting in the bucket again, eh? You know loads of us haven’t even gotten our first go around.”

Dan wasn’t really his name. It was his name when was alive, and since it was the only time he had a name, it stuck. “No one makes you keep dropping your slips in the human bucket,” he told the non-entity. “Look at the lines for birds, or sand flies. They’re short and the turnover is fast. You could be existing by tomorrow if you cared that much.”

“Who wants to be a sandfly? Listen to Dan. Got to be human once and now thinks he can tell me to be a sandfly.”

Dan tried to shrug and walk away, but he didn’t have shoulders or feet and so just kind of glided from the conversation. He understood their frustration. Everyone wanted to be alive, and when you were alive, all you did was try to stay alive—even if sometimes you really didn’t want to be. Being alive was a very enviable position.

Lines of formless non-entities trailed away from the human bucket. Shorter ones took up the non-space leading to the birds, bears, beavers, etc, etc. The non-space was truly formless, since Dan currently floated through an abstract realm of nothing. Below them was Plato’s World of Forms where ideas finally started to take shape.

Plato never shut up about it. He’d been human more than a dozen times, and after the fifth time coming back, he managed to create the World of Forms from the growing expanse of his experiences. Every time he went and came back, new ideas took shape. Sometimes, Dan looked down and watched a new idea pop into existence. The wheel—that was a big one. Then on and on to things like pencils, typewriters, mammograms, and satellites. Everything that could be with its truest form floating in the ether.

Dan’s goal was simpler. He had only been human twice and the first time he died as an infant so young he hadn’t even known his own name. However, it was enough to make him want to go back. The way the blankets felt on skin. Having skin. The warmth of another person holding him. The taste of something sweet. Tasting things. Eating. Even if it was just breast milk. He didn’t experience friendship on that first trip, but he did experience love. It was preternatural, the way it welled in you before your brain even developed enough to process sight or register sound. Dan yearned for it again. There were many things in the land of non-existence, but love was not one of them.

“Hey, watch it,” a different non-entity squealed. Dan accidentally floated through them, lost in thought.

To bump into someone. Wouldn’t that be pleasant. His second time alive, Dan really got into being human. It was such a rare gift. He fought for other people and wanted the rules to benefit everyone. Unfortunately, it was the 1400s and he ended up only making it to his early twenties before they chopped off his head. This time, if he got another run at it, Dan would relax. Take it easy, take a bus. It’s not that fighting for a better world to be born back into wasn’t worthwhile, it was just that Dan didn’t know how long it would be before his next time on Earth, and there were so many things he never got to try.

That second time, he was born in a small French village with a mother who loved him very much, but died of tuberculosis when he was twelve. She loved to put vanilla into his hot chocolate near Christmas, and every early December, they would gather scraps of twine and tie them into chains links. Every day it got nearer to Christmas they cut one off.

So, he knew things like water and cocoa and the sun and running. He swam. These were all things he wanted to get back to. But he never flew, and it was different flying as a bird. The operating system of a bird was smaller. It didn’t appreciate flying the way the human operating system did. The same way that eventually the human operating system stopped appreciating the miracle of planes or two working legs.

This time, he wanted to see other parts of the world. Feel the Indian Ocean. Get sand that wasn’t French between his toes. Try Vietnamese food. Aside from creating an entirely new plane of existence, loving Bun Cha Gio was another thing Plato never shut up about. Dan wanted it. And while here he could zoom in and experience Jupiter or choose to become organic matter in one of Saturn’s rings, Earth was the only place he could want and do something about it.

“Put your ticket in the human basket again?” a nicer non-entity asked as Dan sidled his way to a more favorable part of nothing.

Dan nodded, then realized he had nothing to nod so said, “Yeah. Go big or go home.”

“I like that energy. I put mine in to being a tree. They last longer. Figured I’d take my time, put down some roots, har-har. But seriously, I hope I wake up on a sunny mountainside, and when all of us are really cooking, we’ll be so wrapped up in being alive we won’t even notice the smoke we’re making. This blue haze that tells the rest of the world that this forest is alive and well. We are dense and our roots go deep, and no man has lifted a saw to us because we are in our own part of the world far from his reach. We didn’t live to be a wall in a house or a desk to be written on. We lived to be alive. Because one day an eagle got a seed stuck in his claw and carried it up to this remote part of the mountain, and that seed grew a sapling that grew another and another because Earth was made for life. I hope we sit there for a hundred years or more, and when the day comes that men finally build something strong enough to reach us, or lightning shoots from the sky and burns us down, I will float back up here and tell you all about it.”