Driving To The Sea
She’s tired of little infinities. Of moments seldom felt. Of the all encompassing numbness that has taken refuge inside a piece of her that she has never been able to find. Numbness that has begun to feel like it’s own emotion, severed from her body but still impossibly there. So she drives to ocean, lays on the sand, and hopes it’s enough. Hopes that the push and pull of the ocean will push her somewhere where numbness doesn't feel anymore. Hopes that she can memorize fear so nothing will scares her more than this moment. She’s tired of little infinities. Of moments seldom felt. Of all encompassing numbness and rogue chests. Of just enough and almost right. Of blissful minutes that never lasts. Of never expecting them to. Of an emotional haze that feels something akin to happiness but is never quite there. So she drives to the ocean, lays on the sand, and prays to something that she won't drift away.
A Tangible Anxiety
She makes believes her house has new walls and creates allegories about rotting foundations. In her mind mildew crumbles at her feat and the stench of disillusion is so thick in the air she cannot breathe. She has never seen these wall, but she pretends that there are terminates nesting in them. They come out while she sleeps and crawl into her ears, breeding in the crevices of her brain. They feed on her will. She calls countless exterminators, but they look at her like she's lost her mind. There are no walls, there are no termites, it is all in her head. The stench of disillusion is so thick in the air she can not breathe, mildew is growing on her body, it starts on her feat. She begins to imagine that the walls are stretching, they have created a labyrinth around her that she cannot escape. The termites are back. They are nesting in the walls. If she stills long enough she can feel their babies teething on her brain.
Hero
But you don't survive. When the bullet hits, life seeps out of you body like water out of a cracked dam. You've never taken the time to memorize the feeling of air wadding your lungs, but all at once you wish you had so you could juxtapose the feeling to this. Because this is not what you imagined death would feel like. In the movies it is always quick. The hero takes his final breath after a valiant battle. He doesn't fight death, he allows it to overtake him. To become apart of him until there is nothing left but a body. You, by all accounts, are a hero. You have fought for your country in a war that has given you nothing but a title. You are a hero but this not heroic. Death is not what the movies make it out to be. When the bullet penetrates your skin you feel like every ounce of you has cracked and shards of yourself has chip off onto the dirt. The cracks in your skin are hollow and deep.You are a hero. You die as slow and meaningless as this war. When the bullet's impact forces you into the river, you realize that Robert Frost was wrong.The world does not end in fire or ice, It ends in water so clear that If you had survived you would've sworn it was air.