The rose has thorns to protect its beauty, but when the petals fall off and its beauty is gone and the stem withered away, why do the thorns remain? Why do they remain to protect the empty shell of that once breathtaking flower? What left is there to guard? To live on for? Why do I remain? When the very thing that I was created for, to possess a soul just like a rose was planted to possess beauty, is gone?
Where do the forgotten ones go?
Where do the destroyed ones go?
Where do the empty shells, the boots and helmets that carry their thorns around on this planet—those that lost who they are.
Where do they go?
SPRING
Like a rotten log half buried in the ground – my life, which has not flowered, comes to this sad end.
-Ota Dokan
XXXIII
After the five day journey back, I exit the starship at O’Hair International spaceport in Chicago. I grab my only luggage—the small sack of supplies given to me by Jack—and walk down the hallways to the metro. Throughout the spaceport hallways I see posters of anti-Herculean images plastered everywhere. Among them are also pictures of Uncle Sam holding a US flag and pointing back at you. Alongside him is another man holding a flag of the Party, across his neck a Medal of Honor.
That man is me.
I take a speed train to North Carolina. During the ride I watch a video screen on the rear of the seat before me. It replays news reports about the Kuplar ambush. A newswoman speaks, “Brave Coalition forces were caught in an ambush in the fringes of the Kuplar region to aid a besieged allied town. The town was full of civilians about to be massacred by Herculeans. The heroic Coalition forces held the line long enough for the town’s inhabitants to escape till terrorists finally overran them by an ambush. We take this time to remember their great sacrifice as none survived, including one of our very special Medal of Honor heroes, Private Peter Verum.” The report continues after the moment of silence, declaring that a memorial will be held later today by the President to commemorate their sacrifice.
After the speed train, and a variety of buses, I am back into my old college town. I go to the local library, right in downtown of where I would drive around that cruise route with Isaac. Using a public computer, I find a local lawyer, Mr. Reeves, and print a picture of Isaac. I grab the picture of him and leave. The only one I could find was one from the military yearbook. It’s better than nothing.
I enter out onto the street, and look down the route I used to drive on so many times. I sit down on a bench and watch the cars pass by for a while. It becomes evening. I cross the street to a parking garage. Inside I find a wallet in the middle of the garage, in it is a spare key. I press the alarm button and find the corresponding car, and take it out of the garage and onto the main route.
I drive slowly through the route. “We haven’t been in the Wang-Stang forever, huh Isaac?” I wipe my eyes. “I wonder what bars are popping tonight.”
The route enters downtown. I see the first bar, Stout Brothers. It looks pretty empty despite it being night already. “Damn, that place looks dead, hopefully the other joints are doing better.”
I keep driving through downtown on the route. “No Isaac, you won’t get me to smoke, goddamn, don’t you know that stuff is going to kill you eventually?”
I roll the window down so that the smoke can clear out. Instead, I feel the cold wind whip at my tears.
“Seriously man, we gotta stop coming out here every weekend to just get drunk. We’ll get fat.”
I keep driving down the route. The lanes become hard to see as my eyes get blurry. All of a sudden the route ends, before me a huge freeway. It cuts right through the state park I always pulled over at. Next to it is a sign saying: Your Party at work. Finished Public project. The loop has been cut in half, and the only way to keep going was to get onto the freeway.
“No! What the fuck is this!”
I pull the car over at that old turnoff that is now a dirt mound, trash littered everywhere.
“What the fuck happened!” I climb over the mound. The whole meadow is gone. Instead it’s the freeway and a construction project of some sort. I run up against the fencing that cuts right through that wild rose patch I cherished. They’re all gone too. “WHY!” I shake the chain link fence. “WHY! GO AWAY!” I see a second shadow near me. “Isaac?” I turn around quickly. It was just the passing lights of a car on the freeway.
“Isaac! Isaac!” I fall onto my knees and hands, cutting my hand on some trash. I try to get up, but the chain link fence has caught onto my pocket ripping it as I move. The paper with the lawyer’s info falls out. But something else drops too. The crumpled up paper of that poem game Isaac and I played, falls out by my feet.
I slump back against the fence. “One last poem spit, huh buddy?” I ask the cold night.
I try to remember what I wrote before I open it. Before I see what he wrote.
“Isaac, where are you? It’s your turn.”
The paper gets smeared with my tears. I finally unfold the nearly ruined paper to read his line. The last word being Love.
Love, what is that? I could write down some sophisticated shit like we’ve been doing, but that wouldn’t do it any justice. Instead, I’ll say what really matters. I love you Peter, I love you like a brother. I really missed you while you were gone doing your holotour, sucking in all the fame and limelight. It was hard going through the motions every day of realizing what I did, without you there to help me through it. I am sorry I have been acting cold or quiet to you lately. I just didn’t know if you got over it, and if you did, I didn’t want to bring you back down with my agony. But like that promise we made at the rose bush you showed me, back in our oh so far away hometown, we got to look out for each other, and I always will Peter, I’ll look over you, because I love you.
I push the paper back into my pocket. I crawl up the dirt mound near the car and fall to my knees on top of it. I raise my arms at the lights of the new freeway traffic. “Isaac please come back! I fucking need you! I love you! Look what they fucking did to us! Our route!” I slide down the mound. “No, no, no, no. Isaac. Please man. Please!” I take out his lighter and try to light it, but it won’t. “PLEASE!” Where the Dream ends has become bent and scratched. I raise myself up and slump against the car. I look into the mirror to see my dirt covered face leak tears down my scarred cheeks.
“Why am I alive!”
XXXIV
The next day, after sleeping behind the forsaken mound of trash, I drive to my parent’s house in the city over. It is daytime and I know both of them must be at work. I hop over the fence into the backyard, and go through the unlocked sliding glass door. I go to my parent’s room; underneath the bed in a shoebox is a pistol. I grab it and walk away.
The house is a two story building, with a long hallway between my parent’s room and my old one which are both on the second floor. The hallway has a side railing that overlooks the big living room on the first floor. I slide my hand across the railing like I always did as a kid, and walk to my old room. It’s been turned into some office and storage space since I went to college. I unhook the window and walk out on the shingles, and sit by the edge over the front porch. Ever since Snap died, I placed a dream catcher by where I slipped off. My mom told me it would keep that owl away. Keep me safe.
I take out the picture of Isaac, and place it next to the weather worn dream catcher resting under the window pane. I look at the huge strolling white clouds in the sky. “What’s it like out there, buddy? Is it heaven or hell? I hope there’s something. I even hope there is a hell, because I know at least, I’ll be with you again.”
I leave and go through the window and down the hallway, but see Creon’s room. I fall into it on the ground. “I’m sorry! I’m so sorry little brother!” the carpet becomes damp as lay my face against it. “I wanted to watch you go to college! I wanted to take your first bar, become your uncle,” I cough, I can’t do this anymore! “I just
can’t Creon, I’m sorry. You wouldn’t even recognize me anymore. I’m not your brother.”
I leave the house with the pistol, and go to the hill overlook near my old college, and watch the sun set as I sit on a bench. I remember when I was a kid my parents made me go to church. The biggest thing about it all, that confused me the most, was that we had souls. They were described as if there was a second one of us inside our fleshy body, and that they can be saved or destroyed by God. As I grew older however, I outgrew this belief and the validity of religion in general.
But one thing was true from it all. We have souls, and mine was destroyed. Not the souls that religion preached about, but my essence. The essence of what it means to be human.
The evening arrives, the falling sun casts its last light onto the college in the valley before me. The few students on the overlook with me begin to leave back to their lives. I remember it is Spring Break for them—it would have been for me too. All around my feet are crushed beer cans and other trash from the numerous parties and one night stands that have happened here since time immemorial
I look around to confirm I am the last one on this overlook as the stars begin to shine above. I grip the hard plastic handle of the gun in my sweater pocket, but it instantly stings from the cut on my hand I received yesterday. I grab it with my other hand, and place it on the bench next to me. I stare at the lit up campus and sky for a while. I try to look for that goodbye feeling you attempt to achieve before you move on to something else.
When my soul left, it left me unbearably empty. This emptiness was not light though, but heavy. It has become a gigantic boulder strapped to my back that I have carried around ever since. To feel full, to feel the joy of life, that is to be light and free. Instead, this emptiness grips me, and keeps me trapped in place and shrugged over like Atlas. I carry my own world of emptiness and the friends it brings along. These friends dot my globe like ugly black continents that pollute the oceans of my life: depression, fear, despair, and hopelessness. My Atlas has one country and citizenship, agony.
I try to search for that goodbye but I just can’t find it.
Whatever, they’re overrated anyway.
I grab the gun and stare at the barrel, the barrel stares back at me. The moonlight flickers about on its dark surface, giving it an essence of mystery as secret as death itself. I used to be terrified of dying. Now though, I see it for what it really is, a way out, and it doesn’t worry me or concern me of what may come after death, if anything comes at all. All I really need to know about it is that it ends whatever I am feeling here during this life.
I switch the safety off and raise the gun, aiming it at my face. After a few moments I lower the weapon. This is no way to go out, looking at the ugly end of a gun. I look up at the stars again. Their splendor is the last thing I want to remember before I am gone. They are beautiful, even despite the fact that I had recently returned from a war on one of them. A war that took my mind and soul and chose to, out of some cruel fucking joke I guess, to leave only my empty body behind. Tonight, I will finish the process.
I search the stars for the one I fought under the past year till I find its general location. I wonder how many people in it its star system are looking out into the sky right now, and maybe gazing upon my sun. Oblivious that I am about to take my life.
I bring the gun back to my forehead and feel the cold trickle of sweat on my palms and forehead. Suicide is not an easy thing, or the coward’s way out as many people label it. It takes resolve and determination to do it, courage really. I mean, I just finished participating in a war where at any moment I could have been killed, or if I so wanted to, I could have easily killed myself by simply walking into the open of the battlefield.
But I didn’t, instead, I held onto some whimsical belief that I could find redemption and purpose to my meaning again, if… maybe, just maybe I came back.
But what can one person really do to make a difference?
Why should I carry on with this pain inside of me, just to try and take a parting shot at the practically invincible system that destroyed me in the first place? A system I really have no chance against. A system that would easily use its immeasurable power to stop me before I even tried, like they did back on Nova Terra when I fought for them.
There’s a difference between giving up and accepting the reality of defeat.
I am just a body at the morgue without the ticket on its toe yet.
I lower the gun, and move to the edge of the overlook. The fog rolls in and creates a dream state of grey that casts itself onto everything it touches. Right here, right here is where I can see everything for what it is, a veil of uncertainty and fear that wraps itself around everyone’s life like the fog does right now to me. Right here is where it all started, the end of my life. So it will also be right here where I finish it.
I’m gonna do it now. Just get it over with. I place the barrel to my mouth and bite my teeth around the uncomfortable surface of the object. My tongue pushes its self-up against the barrel edge, but then moves quickly to the side of my mouth. I do this out of fear by thinking how bad it would probably hurt my tongue if it were so close to the exiting bullet. I have to pull the pistol out so that I can laugh without chocking. Then laugh harder at the thought that I was afraid of choking on a loaded weapon inside of my mouth. I fall to my knees to regain my breath.
I yell out into the dark valley from my overlook, “Why can’t I just fucking do it!”
Nothing.
“Huh? Why can’t I just fucking put this against my head and pull the goddamn trigger!” I put the gun to my temple but all I feel is my heartbeat pounding louder through my eardrums. “I’ve killed so many people, why is it so hard to just kill one more?”
Nothing.
“You know life, the only thing you ever gave me, was nothing. Nothing!”
Nothing.
“Yeah that’s right, just fucking keep doing it again. Keep giving me nothing.”
Nothing.
I hold my breath and place the gun back into my mouth—kill me! The trigger is strangely heavy as my finger rests against it. Heavy with the sorrow I feel. Heavy with the self-hatred I feel. Heavy with the fear I feel.
Suicide is not any easy thing to do. I know that for sure. I place the gun back on the bench and curl up on the side of the seat with it. I am pathetic. I can’t even do it. I talk myself up all day and I still can’t even do it. I hate my life so much, but still, I can’t even fucking do it.
Why is life so cruel?
Soon the cold takes over. I let it send shivers down my body as it hallows me out of any warmth I had left from earlier today. I become as cold as the midnight air and my entire body becomes numb. It becomes a numbness I have felt many times before. It is a numbness that glazes my eyes with a dry cold that I can no longer cry at the stars. This numbness is the nothing. The nothing that I receive as an answer to any question I have. The nothing is emptiness. The emptiness that has taken over my life. The emptiness that is my soul.
I fall asleep in the emptiness. But this emptiness is a void, a never ending void. So when I fall asleep, I am falling asleep into the emptiness that is I and my soul, but even then I am not actually sleeping, but instead, I am falling through that emptiness…and I never stop falling. I fall through the emptiness in my mind of what should be dreams as I sleep. And my sleep, it is only a limbo that I fall through till I awake, where I just continue to fall as in sleep. The worst part though, is that it’s a never ending cycle. I never stop falling. I never get a break or a chance to rest. I just keep falling. I fall through the bullshit of the day as I go through the motions of it. Then I fall through the reality of my emptiness at night when my eyes close.
I am always falling!
When I close my eyes I even see myself falling. I see myself start at the top of my eyelid and watch myself as I fall towards the bottom into nothing. Then it repeats, again and again, falling and falling. And it will never stop;
we will never stop falling through our fears, our agony, and self-hatred.
Instead, those feelings have become a cushion that slows my descent into the pain striking abyss that I have become. There is no light at the end of this tunnel. There is no hope. It is the never ending cycle of nothing onto nothing. Disgust onto despair. Despair onto hopelessness. Hopelessness onto self-hatred. Self-hatred onto terror. And it is this terror that consumes us all. The terror that I can’t escape. The terror that has bridled itself with the emptiness inside of me that now, all I feel is its chilling clutch upon my very being. I just keep falling through it, always falling through the terrifying emptiness that has taken hold of me.
From this emptiness onto the next emptiness that is me, one can only just keep falling. I fall till it becomes a blur that no longer makes sense—that I don’t even care about anymore.
But yet, I still can’t kill myself.
Instead, I just keep falling.
The sound of birds chirping wakes me. My body is frigid and numb from the morning cold that it hurts to breathe and move. I lie on the bench as the sun rises, and watch its light greet me. Next to me is the gun that I wish took my life. I push myself up and grab it from the damp earth. I used to be vehemently against weapons, advocating that they were the greatest threat to my nation’s people. But I guess guns really don’t kill people after all. It’s the people behind the trigger that do.
Travesty (SolarSide Book 1) Page 33
