penfist

stories are the bones of everything

memory

Aftermath

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“People aren’t supposed to look back. I’m certainly not going to do it anymore.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

Ten years, nearly, since I came back from my first experience of war. I’ve learned a lot since then. About the lies society breeds into us.

About flags and nation-states. I hope I’ve learned a bit about honor and what it means to live meaningfully.

I won’t discuss my worst memories of war, although they still trouble me at times. Mostly I want to discuss the utter banality of modern evil. On the eve of a decade back in relative peace, a state I don’t really know what I’ve done to deserve, I mostly wonder about the people I left behind. The ones trapped in Baghdad. I wonder how many of them are alive. How many of them are sane. How many of them have been broken beyond repair.

It is, I think, our nature as human beings to live in the moment. We try to survive as best we can. When opportunities allow for it we thrive. Sometimes the thriving leads to dancing and parties. I’m all for that.

One of my most poignant memories of war is that of a moment when we were gathered to go out into the place we called the red zone, which was almost all of the country. The irony of living in a space designated the green zone has never escaped me. The irony of my existence there was amplified by the fact that everyone who hated what we represented, our flags, and our imperfect ideals, and the way we saw god. Those people had our coordinates dialed in. The so-called green zone was a shooting gallery where death consisted of a moment of awareness and then shattering. The missiles and rockets came in like random horsemen of the apocalypse riding on the wings of death. They lobbed the hate when they could. Every time they could.

I’m sure someone was tracking the inbound hatred on a screen. It wasn’t me. In such an environment, one must, of necessity, become numb. In some human environments, one can use blending as a survival technique. In the green zone surrounded by the red zone that was not the case. We went about our business and blindly hoped that the airborne anger wouldn’t choose us on any given day. It never directly chose me. I watched them land a few times, these explosive daggers made of death. I felt them in my core, ran from them, thought about their nature, and from some numb place inside, I feared them. But I had my distractions. Enough so that unlike one fellow soldier, I didn’t wake up on any given morning and simply refuse to get out of bed.

I put on my uniform, strapped on my battle rattle, met the day.

Surrounded by concrete t-walls and well meaning bureaucrats with guns, most of us, I think, believed we were making the world a better place. A freer place. Looking back, that seems naive.

My first war was predicated on manufactured facts that weren’t. Iraq’s involvement in fostering terrorism against the United States was marginal at best when we invaded the country. That is not to say that I regret my service. I did nothing I am ashamed of in my first war. I hope that it has made me more thoughtful. I hope that it has made me more compassionate. I hope that war has grown my empathy for all the human beings I will encounter today and tomorrow for all long as I shall live.

One memory, one that I want to revisit with you in this moment, is that of a noisy, dusty morning at the edge of the green zone. Preparing to dance with death and chance, we did all the things required of Americans saving the world from terror in 2006. We checked our combat loads. We coordinated our communications. We made sure that our maps were up to date and that our vehicles were fully fueled and in proper running order.

It was a scene of professional chaos full of barked orders, frenetic activity and people living on the edge of war’s numb reality. The memory of the kid sitting with his back against a t-wall calmly reading Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five stays with me and it always will. I had experienced a close call with a mortar two days prior. We briefly made eye contact. He went back to reading his novel.

I remember. Now I share the memory with you.

There is always an aftermath. I’ll always wonder what the kid I saw that day thought of Vonnegut. That kid saved me from something. I’m not quite sure what.

“It was a movie about American bombers in World War II and the gallant men who flew them. Seen backwards by Billy, the story went like this: American planes, full of holes and wounded men and corpses took off backwards from an airfield in England. Over France, a few German fighter planes flew at them backwards, sucked bullets and shell fragments from some of the planes and crewmen. They did the same for wrecked American bombers on the ground, and those planes flew up backwards to join the formation.

The formation flew backwards over a German city that was in flames. The bombers opened their bomb bay doors, exerted a miraculous magnetism which shrunk the fires, gathered them into cylindrical steel containers , and lifted the containers into the bellies of the planes. The containers were stored neatly in racks. The Germans below had miraculous devices of their own, which were long steel tubes. They used them to suck more fragments from the crewmen and planes. But there were still a few wounded Americans though and some of the bombers were in bad repair. Over France though, German fighters came up again, made everything and everybody as good as new.

When the bombers got back to their base, the steel cylinders were taken from the racks and shipped back to the United States of America, where factories were operating night and day, dismantling the cylinders, separating the dangerous contents into minerals. Touchingly, it was mainly women who did this work. The minerals were then shipped to specialists in remote areas. It was their business to put them into the ground, to hide them cleverly, so they would never hurt anybody ever again.”  
― Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

Smoke and butterflies

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The day the forest caught fire I was out looking for butterflies. The ones that hide in the deepest, oldest parts. It’s been so many years now. I can’t remember anymore. Not clearly. Not like I once did. I used to remember every line in your face. Especially around the eyes where the wrinkles all came together when you smiled.

I saw the swarm of butterflies only moments before I smelled the smoke. In a clearing deep in the old forest. I watched. Mesmerized. They danced for me. Only seconds. It was the most beautiful thing.
Then I caught the smoke in my nostrils. It’s weird how time changes the reality of things. It’s weird how immediate danger changes the nature of time.

I ran for my life. For all I know those butterflies continued their dance until the smoke blotted out their warm patch of sunshine. Maybe they were still dancing when the sparks off the trees began burning their delicate, impossible wings. Do butterflies have souls? If they do I hope there is an afterlife where they continue to dance in lovely, impossible kaleidoscopes.

I met her close to home. The fire raged all around. We tried to look for you. There was no time. We called out as we ran. Hand in hand. I thought about pauses. The pauses turned into commas. Commas make me impatient. It was hard to breathe from all the smoke around us. Our calls grew weaker. Our hearts beat too fast. There was nothing left but the desperation of our need to find cooler air. We stopped calling and tried to outpace the fire. Somehow we did. We didn’t see you along the path that day.

Home. That place we all loved so much. Burned to the ground. Nothing left but memories and the feel of her hand in mine. We stood at the edge of the forest where we had lived and cried together. It was hard to talk. So many years ago. I wish I could remember the sound of your laugh. I know it tinkled sometimes. I close my eyes and try to imagine exactly how your shoulders arched when you were amused. There was something in that stance you had. Something as beautiful as the swarm of golden butterflies.

In the days after our disaster I talked to the old man who lived over the ridge. He lost everything too. His family, his livelihood, his sense of humor. He told me that he’d been out looking for medicinal plants. Said that when he smelled the smoke and began to run back towards home he saw you. He told me you were floating like a wraith through the smoke. He told me you looked at him and continued into the heart of that horrible, all consuming maelstrom of flames.

We rebuilt eventually. In a barren landscape that was already beginning to renew itself. Life is strange. It builds itself out of the bones of death. Always. A cycle that repeats over and over. I suppose it will continue until the universe itself decides the time to end has come. I look for you still. Over every trail I’ve worn through the young forest that grows around us indifferent to the past. Trees don’t remember. So I’m told.
Sometimes I think it would be better to be a tree.

I could shelter a swarm of golden butterflies under my leaves during a gentle rain. I wouldn’t struggle with the question of what happened the day of the fire. Or why you would ever want to do a thing like that. Things would be simple if I were a tree. I would be born and die in exactly the same place without ever worrying about why I can’t remember exactly what your smile looks like anymore.

Sometimes on my walks with her we come upon more butterflies. It makes me happy that they still dance. The trunks aren’t as tall or thick as the ones I remember from back then. But the butterflies are just as golden and their dances are just as magical. I look at her and I am happy. But both of us miss you and the way you used to dance. It was like you could fly. I hope somewhere you are still dancing.

They say a mischief maker started the fire that day. The ones who investigate such things. I sometimes think it was you playing with matches. You used to be fascinated by flames. We had to warn you not to sit so close to the hearth on cold nights. You would stare sometimes. Into the flames. In a way that made me think you wanted to touch them.

What makes a butterfly different from a moth. Which one were you? It doesn’t really matter. We both miss you.

The memory of storms

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There is only the memory of a storm. Lingering on my skin, haunting my dreams. Baghdad, Iraq. In the year 2006. Sounds and smells come back the most. I try to suppress them because of the panic attacks and the way those have crippled me at times. I haven’t had one for a while.

Now, when the memories come unbidden, it is usually an overwhelming feeling of sadness and loss. The awareness of my own fragility. The death of innocence. The inevitability of endings and an understanding that the privilege of memory is not granted to everyone.

All the fragments came together in the storm my last night in Iraq. I slept eventually but first my brain forced me to travel unwanted pathways. Made me ask why my life was intact when so many others had been shattered. When so many souls had leaked out onto the ground or been dispersed into bits and fragments inside the concussive blasts of hatred that I felt many times. Those punctuation marks only frayed my mind. They failed to shatter my body.

It doesn’t rain often in Baghdad. In a year we had perhaps a half dozen storms that actually contained life giving water sent down from the skies. My last night in Iraq I experienced one of those. The air became heavy with that smell of impending wet while my unit shuffled from line to line suffering the endless insults of modern war. The wind picked up as we finished our checklists and winded our way through the endless t-walls, machines and tired soldiers to take our sustenance. By the time we returned to our tent to retire, the sand was blowing into our faces. Stinging our skin.

The tent walls moved and sang to us in harmony with the angry air outside that night. As the storm’s fury mounted, I wondered why I was lucky enough to be alive. My overwhelming sense was that I wouldn’t make it through the night. That the storm had been sent as a last cruel joke. I felt that since none of the mortars or rockets had taken me out I was due to die in the tent that night. If a sniper didn’t have my mark, then surely the tent would fall in on me and finish the job.

I finally drifted off into a troubled sleep thinking about all the things that hadn’t killed me. Some men and women can fall asleep anywhere after being exposed to war. I haven’t mastered that skill. I was probably the last one to fall asleep that night.

I woke up to the sound of thunder crashing. The tent walls were moving so much I was certain they would collapse in on me at any point. I could hear vehicles grinding by and see lightning through the entrance flaps as the wind played games with my worldview.

Instead of waiting for the tent to collapse and end the nightmare I’d been living, I did what human beings do. I fought my way through the chaos and uncertainty to relieve my bladder. The memories of that short journey are burned into my brain.

Endless convoys of sand colored armored gun trucks moving through the darkness sometimes illuminated by the sodium lights that seem to be omnipresent inside U.S. forward operating bases. In the rare moments between thunder crashes, shrieking gusts of wind, the sound of rain hitting sand and the grinding, rumbling noises of convoys the closest thing to silence was the constant hum of diesel generators powering the camp. War has a very distinct set of sights, sounds and smells that I cannot forget.

That storm, on that particular night, added a level of surreal to the backdrop. The storm ensured I will not lose the tableau of that night until I am dead. It burned in the significance of my fragility, the randomness of man’s hatred towards man and the fact that I was supposed to go home in the morning.

The tent survived nature’s fury. No mortar landed on me during my fitful sleep. The chartered jet we flew across an ocean to return to our world did not go down in the ocean as I suspected it would.
But that storm is still raging in my head. Reminding me that one day I won’t be able to escape an ending to my story. Storms remind me that I shouldn’t waste time. Remind me that the routine always holds the potential to become life changing.

What am I doing with my time? How am I spending the moments between storms? I lost a friend yesterday, long before I expected it. His storm came in a different form but it had the same net effect as the one I experienced on my last night in Baghdad. His tent fell in on him and became a burial shroud.

The memory of storms reminds that I should use the moments I have left intentionally. That I should live mindfully. That I should choose my relationships carefully. That every moment is an investment in becoming. Connectedness and love mean everything. I wish I’d understood that lesson better the night I was waiting for my plane out of Baghdad.

To my friend who just passed, I want to say, thank you for allowing me to know you. Thank you for letting me use the memory of your final storm to reinforce lessons I believe will cause my life to resonate more richly. Thank you for serving as an example of kindness and love that will allow me to be better for the people around me.

My final storm is coming. Yours is too. The only question is what will we do with the time between this moment and that one?

In memory of Dan

It was like this…

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The human brain is a funny thing. It doesn’t really hold on to the past very well. I speak for myself of course. Every brain is different. Some people, I’m told, have photo recall. They see remember everything exactly as it happened.

I know a girl who forgets some things almost immediately. Other things, her brain clamps down on and holds close with the teeth of a vicious attack dog. Her brain does one thing with the past and mine does another. We’re different that way. Someone else I used to know turned everything into a life or death emergency. Yet another person who passed through my life insisted on revisiting every recent event in the hopes that all concerned would agree with her version of how things went. She had a compulsive need that way.

My brain turns memories into stories. Softens the edges. Creates heroes and villains. Adds richness and descriptive details. Changes the timeline for dramatic effect. Sometimes I think that makes me a liar, and sometimes I think it makes me a good storyteller. The truth is probably somewhere in between.

I have to deal with the way my brain holds on to the past and processes it. Acknowledging my own tendency to distort the past and turn it into an entertaining story is important.

I can process a trauma by making my own role something I can live with. But that might not be what actually happened in the moments. In the story I might be brave. In real life I probably wasn’t. My hands were shaking. My teeth were chattering. I was behind a wall when the bullets started flying. Not running towards them.

There are 1,000 ways to get through events that should have or could have killed you or left you mentally broken. My way of coping is to make the thing into a story. But I mix up the pieces and parts of everything after a while. The faces get stuck on other bodies. The weather is more menacing and alive. Timelines get stretched and compressed. Antiheroes are born out of the shells of boring people.

In my stories, the omniscient narrator is me without the omniscience. How it happened and how it happened in my head are often two different things. Especially after years pass before I write the story. Often times I change details or major plot twists intentionally. I’m a fiction writer after all. Most of my stories start out that way intentionally. In my stories the line between reality and fantasy gets blurred. It happens to you too. Trust me.

It was like this doesn’t necessarily mean the same thing as what actually happened. My brain tricks me. Chances are yours does the same thing. Memory is all we have sometimes to chart the course guiding us into the future.

Remember that. Looking back through the distorted lens of your own filters can be inspiring but it can also be deceiving. Stories are an important part of being human. Be open to the way others see things too. Hear their stories and pick the pieces that fit into your own.

No guide for life is the complete truth because every single one of them has been produced and filtered through human brains. In a world filled with a hundred million stories, pick and choose the ones you believe in carefully.

Make your own stories. Write them down before too much time passes. Pick out the truths that resonate with you and live your own fantasies. Memory is what you make of it.

Polyamory and pain

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I am an alien. The worlds that I carry around with me are not mine. They belong to the story. I am only a caretaker. My destiny is to give away everything. To you and others.

Rugged mountains covered with shantytowns and the sprawl of human life set the backdrop. I observe this place that is not my home from inside an illusory bubble of safety. My routine is that there is no routine. My companions are aliens too. Unwelcome. Our routes remain the same, but nothing else does. Except the chaos.

All is dust. Every tree looks tired. Animals labor under a sun I thought I knew and didn’t. This is not my world. A maelstrom of activity means that I am always watching. The natives are not friendly. My companions and I watch for magnetic bombs in every hand. Have you ever seen your death in someone else’s eyes? I have.

We study every vehicle and every pile of trash carefully. Things in this world explode, unexpectedly. With great violence. Anyone passing by could have a grenade. And the grenade might be wearing bits of me at any moment. If not today perhaps tomorrow. Sudden, violent endings hide among the throngs of teeming life here. Patiently. Waiting.

I see the girl. For a moment the rest of the details are fuzzy. Then clarity comes. She is perhaps 14. Possibly 15. Maybe 12. She is beautiful. I should not be able to see that. Because her head should be covered. In modesty. It is not. The girl is chained to a tree. The tree is chained to this world that is not mine. I am chained to the memory of the time and space.

She is bleeding from her forehead. She is crying. The rocks hitting her are uncaring. The boys throwing them are cruel. They are laughing. And I have rules to follow. I want to stop my vehicle. I want to get out of my armored sphere of unreality. Unchain the girl from the tree. Save her.

But I don’t. I keep going, saving only her memory. I carry her world inside mine. The rules were yours then. They are mine now. Because I took them away from you for doing this to me.

I woke up one morning not long ago and thought of the girl. I love her. I failed her. I thought of you. I love you too. I thought about how much I hurt you and others. When I give you pain, it is hers and mine and yours.

When I hold you tenderly it is her face that I see sometimes. The girl chained to the tree in that other world. The one I am the caretaker for. Please let me hurt you in a different way. One that is good for you. And let me be a part of your story until it ends. Because I’ll never know what happened to that other girl I love.

I am an alien. Love me. Better than I love you. I need polyamory and pain. Do you understand why? I can never stop loving her. Never stop failing her. Never stop trying to save you in the midst of it all.