Reconciliation

Re: Loss. Written several times between 2009 and 2013. 

And it was during lunch one day, those many years ago, that such a feeling of eerie looming overcame me in the mess hall that i was in the company of ghosts. Not those already dead, but those living who one day might be dead. There we were, four thousand strong, eating meal after meal en mass, laughing, smiling, brooding, and there was doom moving through the aisles like a cold shadow that I felt brush among us and I could not shake. And now…

Now Ican still see the faces whenever I dare to look. A damning curse of photographic memories…. Perez, who crouched beside me during Beast in the dusk, her teeth a sharp white smile in her ebony skin, watching us like a predatory hawk. The last time I saw her I was collecting her trash grad week, she stormed out of her room in her gym As, angry but to distracted to harass me… killed in her medical convoy a few short years later. Cunningham, who played guitar with joy at OCF, whose heart was full of such love it felt as though his spirit lay just behind his smile. Loddy, who sat at my own table, who lived across the hall from me, robbed unfairly of everything on a highway late one summer night while walking home. Collins, whose face I only recognize, seen in passing in the endless days of gray in North Area and Corma, who I had class with, who I did group projects with, who was close friends to my friends, who was a living, breathing, speaking face and is now… simply gone… and will not be seen again. Goeke, whose faith was his rock, how we drove the humvees through the night to organize the plebe retreat and spoke in study on faith, and love, and life. And Daren, whose smile was ever contagious. Who smiled even when he was being chewed out, and got chewed out all the more for it. Quick to laugh, immortal in his humor, snuffed in a pop and a boom and the pitter-patter of debris that rains down after…

All of them gone now.

I sat beside Mendaka for a year as he lost one close friend after another in the jungles of a country not my own. A boat blown up. A forward patrol base completely overrun, the occupants killed to a man, his friend the PL. This is what it is like then? This is true loss? Where, then, is the reconciliation?

Are we to meet on some distant shore? Or, more terribly, is this all? A time in a place spent among ghosts whose smiling, laughing hearts, full of courage, faces full of resolve, are silenced in a flash of smoke and a rolling thump that shakes the cities of a desert two thousand miles from friendly shores.

Was your ipod on? Were you joking with the driver? Were you thinking of the mission or had your thoughts drifted towards home, towards a lover, towards the future? Was the sun hot in the blue sky when Time stopped…

and through the cordite was the cordon drawn as smoke billowed angrily into the sky? Were the drills followed after contact, the safeties flipped, the click of their their potent promise, the sectors scanned wide-eyed and dry-mouthed while the .50s were brought to bear, pregnant with vengeance for an enemy unseen while the evac was radioed in and the consequence of tragedy soaked the hearts of the living.

Are you a lonely and miserable God? Your Eden has long gone to hell. The Mesopotamia, this cradle, is shattered. The wherefore and the why are unanswered questions to remain so as sand swallows the blood and silence wraps its cold arms around another life.

Some pigeon loops through the air to the tree in the park… a tree that will be cut down by week’s end and the gray skies offers no comfort. They never have, only claustrophobic confinement for the hours of reflectionon memories stretching ever towards what was towards what might have happened and what may still. There’s a bright orange ‘X’ on that towering oak, and on all of his brothers down the row.