Another Shot, Another Life
Texas Elementary School Shooting
Dear Sir, with the gun, spend one day with me, and you’ll know what I’m about. I’m carrying the spirit of tomorrow when of yesterday. I have not forgotten. Get to know me and then decide to kill me and mine without a thought. With my heavy breasts and my handlebar waist, with the acne scars from the humid summer were of abundance, I was not afraid to taste. To the frizz in my hair all year long, to the sad slant to my eyes from the number of graves I’ve had to dig while my loved memory was being turned into a song. I can’t look at the sky anymore without feeling like I’m about to fall. Children dead. With them gone, mothers are newlywed to despair. Sadness comes to stay. It does not visit. Father’s lost. Heads asunder, bleeding from self-inflicted wounds because they couldn’t stand between their children and their murderers. Brothers sweep the streets for their siblings’ remains, no matter the cost. Anger. Unkempt anger. Sister, won’t you stand on the podium and tell us what’s the value of one life over another and why some die and others suffer. Is it better to mourn in life or mourn for those who can no longer mourn in life for themselves? Why are lives so easy to toss? Should I worry that when my children leave the house, they’ll return as ghosts?
As for me, death has yet to claim me, and I fear that it never will. If I do not die, then stay forever I shall. To do what? To be whom? To sit in the isle of man with a spitting platoon behind me waiting to shoot. To shoot the back of my head or perhaps those invisible enemies up ahead with their backs to us. Those imagined demons that our shooters use to justify their actions. But if death does not claim me, the blood I shall witness firsthand and the cries of the unsuspecting I will carry from land to land. I am the sole survivor of this devastation. I will know the need that settled in the victims’ bellies like bread soaked in tea, engorged and flimsy. Want of a friend, a lover, and an ear to hear what they had not said for years. The desires, the fears, that from inside they had bled. And a hesitancy to share that try as they might, they could not shed. When they die, there “could have’s” and “did not’s” will be transferred to me. Unlike my responsibilities, which I shamelessly shirk as I mourn, their unmade legacies I won’t be to flee. Why does life work out this way? At any given moment, could it be you or me whose souls will take a permanent ride on heaven’s sleigh? I don’t know. None of us do. That’s the point.
