#kat does drabbles

[tara-taurus]

Writing Exercise || Freelancer Style (again)

I served with this guy in '58, real smart guy. Real sharp on his toes. We didn't know a whole lot about each other, because there was no need. We knew what was important, which was that we were strangers who would fight and die side by side and that was all there was to it. I never asked him too many questions, and he didn't offer too many questions anyway. And he died back before the Project ended, and I guess that's okay because none of us should have survived anyway and I guess that's just the curse of the survivor. Looking at your dead friends and thinking how great it would be if you were there too. 

Well, I remember this one time. It's not the sort of thing that usually sticks out to me, because it just sounds so stupid for a grown man to think about. But he had this picture of a girl, and I don't know if she was his sweetheart or just some girl he knew. But I knew it wasn't some stranger because he had a printed picture, framed. Not one of those pictures that you download off some social networking site and put it on your tablet as the background or some shit. It was an honest to God photograph that he kept on his bedside table.

And I was in there with him once, in his room, is what I mean. So I do what anyone would do if they didn't know enough about the man they were with to actually engage in small talk. I asked him who the fuck this girl was, and he didn't really ever answer me. He just kind of shrugged and said "a girl." Now, that vague shit usually just pissed me off, but I didn't press it because the way he said it made me afraid to keep hitting. Besides, I wasn't too curious back then.

But now it's been a good thirty years, and I've had some time to think about what it was that I saw when I asked him who that girl was. There was something in his eyes when he looked at her, and something in the way the air changed that made it all too much to want to step into. It was like when he looked at that picture he could smell her hair, or imagine her sitting in a library somewhere. Reading some book I ain't ever heard of, nor would I necessarily care if I did see it. It was like he was trying to catch the corners of her lips doing something other than smiling, or decipher the shady mists of her grey eyes. 

It was like this guy was loving some idea he dreamed up, because he didn't have some story. And he didn't have some smile when he talked about her. It was like this girl was something that he didn't want to talk about, because there was nothing to talk about. It was probably because he knew then what I know now, which is there isn't nobody on this solar system that's seen what we've seen. Ain't nobody as broken, or angry, or bruised. 

It makes it hard to keep on in the world. Even on all the different human planets, it's hard to find a single person that hears you for what's happened and what you are. 

And full disclosure, I don't even remember what color eyes that girl in the picture had. And honestly, I think they were brown. But I'd like to think they were grey because there's something mysterious in that. It's like someone with grey eyes might be able to understand what happened to a broken shit like me, or that guy I served with in '58. And he must have been so sad because he was looking for some way to see in that goddamn picture if she might have had some little break on her porcelain skin that meant that she was broken too. 

Or maybe it was something a whole lot less sentimental. Honestly, it wouldn't surprise me. You let someone get as old as me, they start rambling on to whoever will listen. And then they'll just keep going. 

Guess it doesn't matter now though, because the guy is dead. 

And dead is fucking roasted. There's no time to be sentimental after you're dead, that comes from an excess of living.

[tara-taurus]

Writing Experiment #2 || Freelancer Style

The way that I feel is not a feeling.

It’s a sound, it’s the sound of your laughter as it echoes through the hollow ships. It’s the sound of your heart beating as I rest my ear against your chest, and I run my hand down your arm in search of your hand. The hand that I might hold. It’s the sound of your breath as it escapes you and grazes the skin on my cheek. A silent hello, an unseen kiss. It’s the sound of your footsteps as you turn round the corner and walk towards me with a smile. It’s the sound of your smile, it’s silence. It’s the hum of the ship as it travels through space.  

But it’s not a sound, either. Not really, not completely.

It’s a touch. It’s a brush of the hand, brief and unintentional. It’s how you squeeze my arm to hold me back, it’s the way your fingers trail down my wrist as you let go. It’s the warmth that you radiate when you stand too close to me, alone. It’s the rising and falling of your chest. It’s a soothing hand placed at the center of your back. It’s ghosting my lips against yours as I rest my head against the pillow. It’s a tingle in my toes, it’s a burning in my fingers. It’s a cool breeze, and it’s chilled glass against my cheek.  It’s being enveloped in a darkness and a lightness all at once until I can’t feel anything at all. Until I hurt, until I ache, until there’s so much inside me I want to explode.

It’s the smell of rain, of coffee, of honey in warm tea. It’s of things I didn’t know existed, and the smell of something sweet. It smells like chocolate and vanilla and strawberries. Like gunpowder, like deep, dark wood in the middle of a forest. It smells like moss and cold mountain air. It smells fresh and new and crisp.

It’s your hair mussed in the morning and the lost nights of sleep. It’s the worry in your shoulders and the ache in your knees. It’s the good and the bad and the everything. It’s wanting to be apart of you and it’s wanting to stay far, far away. It’s pulling you to me so fast and so hard I’m afraid we’ll both break, and it’s never letting go. It’s the fear that I’ll lose you. It’s the color black.

It’s green, it’s red, it’s blue.

It’s the color of a new sun forming, of a nebula as we see it in the distance. It’s the color of crimson skies, and new life. Of a fresh creek. It’s the color of your lips, and the flush of your cheeks. The shadows of your body, the creases in your skin. It’s the wrinkles and the scars. It’s the person that you were, and the person that you are and all the people you could be. It’s watching you grow, and growing with you. It’s excitement, it’s anticipation. It’s a lack of color, it’s every color. It’s white. Bright, and clean, and simple. It’s red. It’s the music playing as people dance to fast. It’s Mars against the black sky.

It’s feeling lonely and not alone all at the same time. It’s looking at you on the Pelican. It’s the ringing in my ears as I worry that when we go our separate ways you’ll never find your way back to me. It’s complete acceptance and absolute denial. It’s the in between.

What I feel is not a feeling. It’s everything. And for as long as I’m living, for as long as I’m sane, for as long as I can bear it, it’s for you.

[tara-taurus]

As I Rise || Post-War Drabble

To be a soldier, is to shed a part of yourself. To abandon your hopes, your dreams, your self. To leave it all in a box to open again when you return home, but the chances of returning home are slim. And the chances of finding that box when you come home are even slimmer. It's a truth that at some point we all had to learn, whether we were dying in the combat zone or wishing we had. Wishing the war had taken us while we waste hours on something we pretend is sleep. 

I've found that most nights, the stories come out. Whether I want them to or not, there's no way to deny them. The phantoms from thirty years ago, still haunting me like they happened yesterday. Yesterday or never, I can't tell anymore. It's like the words spill out of me as I try to skim across the surface of my history. Sometimes it feels like I'm trying to save my own life with these stories. Maybe if I tell it differently, then things will be different in the here and now. 

But once someone is dead, you can't just undo it. Bodies decay and give way to new life. There is no need for last calls or psychopharmacologists. That's for those of us who survived, or at least, for those of us who have been told we survived. There's no way to visit their graves. Half of them don't have one, and the other plots belong to strangers. Only a few names had ever been known in full, some in part, but most were left completely unasked. Except in clearly unreasonable cases, we soldiers were generally called by the names we had been given, or some nickname given to the alias. We made no great effort to disentangle Christian names from nicknames from capitals. 

As it is, though, I don't know if it would have changed too much. I know that the weight of seeing it in stone would be too much for my shoulders. The burden of survival already too heavy for me to carry most days. It wasn't until I left the Project that I felt the weight begin to form. To crush me, consume me, become me. 

It had been realising that none of us had ever been heroes. That their deaths had been in vain. Knowing that when the bell tolled for me, I would have to lie when I met them once more. To keep this secret close to my heart for all of eternity, so that they might rest easily. Thinking that their sacrifice had been felt. That it had been worth every ounce of pain they had suffered in their final moments. Bodies that had burned, been cut apart, bled out. 

Even if I met them again, in some Hell I don't believe in, there are those of which we will never see again. Those who's bodies gather dust in storage containers, minds locked in a state of mindlessness. 

When I tell stories, they live. Sometimes when I tell stories, no one dies. Sometimes everyone dies. Sometimes I give myself a new name, and I tell the tale of my demise. On the nights that I'm most lonely, I tell the bartender that some of us are getting together for drinks next week. Even though we aren't, and even though I mention some of them by name. Usually the ones who died first. The ones who still haunt my restless nights with screams of agony, or even worse, the ones who haunt my days with broken laughter. Memories strung together in a disjointed line, even the happiest of thoughts have become nightmares. 

When I tell these stories, sometimes I can see them sit up. Stand up and wipe away the blood that stained the wounds that had killed them, walk away from the place where they died. I can see them smile. That is the moment I know that I have to keep telling these stories. I want to save their lives -- not their bodies, just their lives.

Because I survived, but my story doesn't have a happy ending. I end when the weight of their stories swallows me down into imagined quicksand. Where I will emerge from the other end of the world, where they are alive and I am not alone. Where my lover will be waiting, and they will take me in their open arms and pull me close to them before the shore pulls me back into reality. I will call it something close to love, others will call it something more sinister. 

But until that day comes, I will keep telling stories. I will tell them to myself at night, I will tell them to the court appointed therapist, I will tell them to the shadows of the trees in the park five miles from my house. The civs think I'm telling war stories. But I don't tell war stories. I've never told war stories.

I tell love stories.