You save yourself, Or you remain unsaved.

I’m somebody’s redemption song. I’m the freedom given to those to unleash in a few words. All I want is to save other people and somewhere along the way I’ve forgotten I’m worth saving, myself. Perhaps it’s not in my power to do so, but I hesitate to lean on others. Society offers conflicting views and in lieu of confusion I simply lean on me. Does it take a village or do you do it for yourself? Do you get by with a little help from your friends or are you MISS INDEPENDENT?

I’m somebody’s amazing grace. You’ll hear it in moans backed by percussive thrusts. I’ll harmonize on the chorus and if I’m drunk enough I’ll write it. You’ll wonder why I’m telling you this shit and I’ll wonder why you care. I’ll wonder why I’m telling you this shit and you’ll wonder why I care. At the end of the song there’s nothing to do but sing. I’ve realised I can sing.

I’m somebody’s redemption song. And I want to be yours

We sat, shining in the sun pure and beautiful our youth was a gleam they thought to be light alas, only a reflection from some broken glass that cuts the feet of clumsy fools

And you know, like I do that we’ll never get old that we’ll never be sorry

There is vision in the american mind of what a woman is or should be. We are programed from the day we are born to strive to look perfect. We grow up playing with barbies that are long legged, little waist, nice chest, beautiful face. Did you know what barbie would look like if she were alive? A life size barbie would be 5’9”, weigh 110 pounds, and have a BMI associated with anorexia. A freakish woman with pencil-thin legs, breasts that would threaten to topple her over, size 3 shoe and a body mass index (BMI) that would put her squarely in the anorexia camp…. she’d have to walk on all fours due to her proportions. Yet it’s okay to give this barbie to a child who looks at it as a goal for what they want to look like. As we grow up and hit the teenage years we are faced with new situations telling us its only okay to be thin. Magazines photoshopped to have women extremely small. Pictures and ads on how to get a perfect body. The idea that no one will want them unless they’re absolutely perfect. Its a mean to control your life. The hours at the gym. The calorie counting. People will always judge themselves harsher then others will. So when all that gym time and eating right still hasn’t given people the results they want, they develop eating disorders. As many as 10 million Americans are now struggling with eating disorders like anorexia and bulimia. Teens are hit the hardest- as many as 500,000 have had an eating disorder. People with eating disorders are at high risk for depression, suicide and substance abuse. The condition can lead to sudden death. And yes its not by choice. It is not a thing of vanity. Its a disease and very serious. So how are you able to reprogram what you’ve been told to believe all your life? How are people able to learn a new lifestyle when the only one they’ve been taught is the one all around them..

The first time I awoke, I hadn’t expected it. A moment ago I had a bullet ricocheting off my ribs and out my back. I looked down to inspect the bloodied wound, to find that it had been dressed, and cleaned, and sterilised. It was white with bandages, not red and black with flesh and internal organs. My uniform was gone. It had been replaced with tubes and wires all connected to machines. A bed had been placed under me. I opened my eyes further, and was blinded by the cold and sterile lights. “Nurse? Nurse! He’s waking up,” said a voice to my right. I struggled to turn my head to the sound. 

“Am I dead?” I’m not exactly sure if I said it, or thought it. I was weak, my body out of my control.

A figure stepped in front of my vision and I put my hands up to defend myself from the shadow. Thin fingers grabbed my wrists and overpowered me easily, I was tired. Too exhausted to defend myself when the needle slipped under my skin. “Okay, here we go, that’s it. Just breathe deep and relax. You’re not dead.” Those strong fingers, softly stroked my forehead, I looked up and saw your face moments before the world shut down beyond my closed eyelids.

The second time I woke up, things were clearer. It was not death, or you, soothing me as I fell asleep, but a nurse. A pretty girl, with a serious face, who was assigned to care for me. “How long have I been out?” I asked, my voice a cracking, barely audible rasp. “Oh, we had some serious work to do on you, a bit more than just an oil change that’s for sure.” She flashed a little grin as she spoke. Her face grew serious once more, “we’ve had you here a little over five weeks now.” My stomach lurched around the scar tissue the bullet left behind. “Five weeks?” I gasped at her, and she nodded solemnly. “You’ve been my best customer,” she became jovial again, but I was somewhere else, the realisation of the time gone and what has happened since. I thought how you would be sick with worry not hearing from me. No news is never good news. “You didn’t talk, you didn’t flirt, and being in a coma also means no sly grabs at my arse!” There was that grin again, but I ignored it. I struggled to sit up but those firm fingers subdued me once more. “Oh no, you don’t wanna do that just yet. You’re not ready for it, and if you bust open your stitches, you’re gonna be really mad about the bill for the bodywork.” I accepted the inevitable, as she lay me down. “Please, I have to write a letter. I have to write home. I have to…” She nodded. She knew. “Before you do that however, we’ve got your mail from home, maybe you’d like to read before you write?”

The little, blonde nurse produced a single envelope from a pocket underneath her apron. It was from you. I tore it open, never having been so eager for anything in my life. I rolled, slowly, under the watchful eye of the young nurse, to my side, so I could read. A sinking feeling seeped into my stomach like a toxic gas. I ignored it and read on, wishing only that you were here to read it to me.

“Dear you,

To the love that I will always keep
this is an impossible apology
because this is not the kind of thing
you have come to expect of me

I can not describe the pain I feel
the heartache throughout my bones
you don’t know how much I’ve needed you
to be beside me here at home
we’ve been together for so long
I don’t know how to live on my own
because I was not designed to do this
or to feel happy when I’m all alone

The sweetness of your kiss
upon my lips, I have missed
while you’ve been gone off to war
while you’ve been fighting for their cause

I have to tell you something
and yet I know you will despair
but in this awful loneliness
I have bedded another man
in a state of drunken grief
and not a premeditated plan
my heart has not beat since then
being with you is the only way it can

You’ll never know, dear
all the days that I’ve shed tears
the remorse I have for hurting you
something I don’t want to live through

And even though the pain I’ve felt
cannot begin to compare to yours
this is something terrible
that I’ve never felt before
I’m sorry for the things I’ve done
that I couldn’t be strong anymore
but I’ll never love another man
the way I gave to you my all

Love always, your darling forever more
you will not find me here when you return
I cannot bear the thought of your heartbreak
or see it when I look into your eyes.

Goodbye.”

Her tears had stained the page, as mine had begun to. The last of our togetherness melding together, in ink, as was our beginnings. Back when I promised that I would write to her, for her, something every day. No matter how small, or seemingly insignificant, there was always something. I rolled onto my back once more, the page crumpled in my fist as tears traced down my cheeks. The nurse had been watching, and had returned to calm me with her soothing voice.

I clenched my teeth and asked for another needle. Something to black me out and numb to anything I might be feeling. I asked, I begged, I cried, I pleaded. Anything to take the pain away.

“Send me to sleep, let me wake from this horrible reality in a faraway place inside my head. Let me sleep forever.”

The cold steel of sedatives disappeared underneath my skin as I faded away, hoping to find an existence where I am null and void. 

“Don’t worry,” she whispered as a tear formed for me. “I won’t leave you.”

I love you my darling plant.

I miss you :/.

I have never known anything like this. This isn’t hell. This is worse.

Sanity, truth, justice, dignity, pride, morality, innocent bystanders, women and children, now all rotten corpses that line the streets where we sinners do not fear to march.

Looking up to the sky, I see formations of planes and anti-air flashes. The thick plumes of smoke are all encompassing, it is impossible to see where the smoke ends and the clouded sky starts. Finding oxygen in the air you breathe is a conscious task, and your body struggles to exhale any pollutants it has taken in. The world is burning under the hands of men who have no faces, like the soldiers huddled against a burning house for warmth. A home, that had seen generations of children grow and absorbed their love, their happiness and their sorrows. All of which now dances between my fingers in flickers of red and orange. A cigarette inhaled in the pitch can cast shadows that weigh you down, and the flames of humanity create quite the silhouetted burden. When skies are grey, any light is blinding.

This place is the darkness I feel, externalised and thrust upon me. Except that, here, people are literally ripped in half as opposed to the figurative, and the only way anyone dies from a broken heart is getting a bullet through the chest. Thoughts only spill out on paper when a headshot puts you to sleep, slumped over the last letter you will ever write home. Never to be read, to disintegrate into particles small enough to breathe in, to absorb, but not be understood. Your blood and your thoughts become oxygen for the next soldier in the next army to fight over this land, but will it give him the steadiness to pull the trigger or make him choke when he looks down his sights?

All of these things swirl in my brain as I set it down for a few hours sleep. I dread opening my eyes, because I know that the first thing I see isn’t going to be you. The sleep is shaken from my body by a loud conversation. Some of the boys are awake and talking. I can hear, I can understand, but in no state to contribute at this present moment.

“So I’m on the toilet right? Finally, I find a fuckin’ toilet in this shit hole, right?”

“Right.”

“Get on with the fucking story already.”

“Okay,” here it comes, I thought. Another one of Pritchard’s stories. “I finally found a toilet to take a shit on. It didn’t flush, because, you know, it was just a little room with the rest of the house taken out by a shell, but I wanted to feel the groove for my arse, right? Because I’m sick of fuckin’ squattin’ all the time, or puttin’ my arse on flat wood…”

I often have the realisation that I don’t belong here. That I am somehow separated from these guys. I would die for them, and them for me, but at any other time than the heat of the moment, I hate them. That’s all we need though, as soldiers.

“… so I’m taking my shit in peace and I hear these footsteps, climbing over the rubble. So I yelled out, ‘Hey, occupied motherfucker!’ and the footsteps stopped. I untensed my sphincter and just as I did, I realised that they hadn’t started again. So I yells out again, ‘Fuck off, man. Don’t be waiting around out there for me, I have waited months for this moment and you can’t take it away from me’”

They all laughed a bit, and even I managed a smile. I missed the start of the story, but everyone was too enthralled, so I decided not to interrupt.

“Picture an indoor toilet, been made an outhouse by a shell, with no roof, right? I got my pants around my ankles and my rifle on my left, military precision at it’s finest. A symphony in co-ordination. All of a sudden, I hear one footstep, a little movement of the concrete.” His voice becomes slow and tense, eyes widened, hands up as if he’s creeping forward slowly. We the audience, leant into his words.

“All of a sudden, it’s real still, and real quiet. I can hear this guy, just outside the door, and by this time I would’ve been shitting my pants if they were still on. I slowly grabbed my rifle and rested it across my lap, ya know? Ready to aim and fire.” 

“Next thing ya know, I hear this ‘Click!’”, Pritchard flicked his thumb, like he was operating a safety, “and I knew what it was, but just as I heard it, I’ll be fucked, I let out the loudest, rattler of a fart you could ever imagine. I mean, this thing would’ve echoed in space mate, I’m telling you, and I hear this fucking laugh come from outside the door. A little giggle that got cut off before it was really finished, and that when I knew it wasn’t one of you bastards, because you would’ve laughed ya fuckin’ arses off.”

We already were, I was chuckling, and the boys were slapping their thighs and loud guffaws could be heard as the day’s young sun filtered through the window into the dusty room. It wasn’t trying real hard just yet though. Pritchard was standing just to the side of the window, so he was illuminated and larger than life. He’d been here a bit longer than most of us, so he was fairly comfortable here. I think he actually liked it here. His heaven is my hell, and as I sat in shadow I lamented that the light was behind him.

“I swung the gun up to the door, just as this bastard kicked the door in and started screaming, still trying to get a fix on me.”

“So what’d you do, Preach?”, he stuck his thumbs under his vest like old suspenders and rocked back on his feet. “I shot ‘im in the face, blew the cunt right back out the door! But geez, I guess some things are just universal, ya know? I mean here we are in the middle of a war and this guy laughs at the enemies fart. What kind of friggin’ soldier is that?”

They all cheered at the story, but I’d lost my smile. I just watched and felt the air in the room change from breezy to suffocating, mixed with the hatred and lack of concern for life. 

“Yep, that was the first time I killed someone.”

The story took on a new meaning. I remembered my own, a much less complicated story. A skirmish between buildings, I was kneeling behind cover and the guy ran right across my field of view. I hardly even had to adjust my aim, a little pull to the left. I drew in the last innocent breath I would ever take and held it, like I was trained, but maybe I even hesitated at what I was about to do. I wanted to know what it be like to kill. I wanted to feel that responsibility. I don’t know what I expected, but I leaned into the gun and pulled the trigger. I hit him in the chest, stumbling his movement a little before he fell face first into the sand. As I exhaled that breath, he seemed to deflate before me, the crumpled mass of tangled, limp limbs seemed to shrink. The next inhalation tasted different, and I quickly realised that I would never feel the same.

My eyes focussed back in the room, though it seemed I had to pull them from the past. The sunlight coming through the window had moved a little to Pritchard’s left. He stepped right, back to his pack, when suddenly, his expression changed. Gone was the smile and the laughter, all that was left was blankness. The look of the conscious mind leaving the body and all that is left is a drooling husk. Warmth splashed over me, and tiny hailstones pattered against my uniform.

There was no sound.

The bullet passed through his skull, his brain, through the wall in between me and Walsh. Blood and tiny fragments of bone sprayed against me as Pritchard fell to the floor, the empty look now permanent.

“Sniper!” came the cry as we huddled away from the window, but it was too late for me to move. Half asleep, the other half in shock, the second shot tore into my gut just below the rib cage. It felt like getting hit with a heavy phonebook, the wind pushed out of my lungs by the tiny piece of metal. Then came the burning, the agony, the realisation of torn, spun organs and exit wounds firing through my entire body. I was dragged to safety, out of line of sight.

I was fading. Not wanting to be in the horrible reality being played out as the others grabbed the guns and hid behind cover as they tried to spot where the bullets had been fired from. Not wanting to bury myself down inside myself, nestled alongside the bullet that was soon about to deliver me what I had often dreamed of.

Every heartbeat was one more closer to death, as my own organs forced blood out of my system. Killing me. Each beat brought searing bolts of pain and flash bulbs fired across my eyes. I could see you in that whiteness, your gentleness, your touch, your smile, all divine.

You bent down over me to kiss me, you placed your hand on my stomach.

There was the sound of terrifying, desperate pleas and screams of pain filling the small space. I could hear them, but didn’t realise they were mine. 

You rubbed my forehead and sang to me. “You are my sunshine…”

I could feel fingers and pressure on the wound and soon I was drowning in the blood that had rushed to the back of my throat.

“Sunshine, sunshine…” your whispers filled my ears and your skin was on mine. Flash.

“We’ve gotta move him, now! Medic! Get a fucking doctor here…” Flash

“Do you love me, baby?” “Of course I do…” as you rested your cheek to my chest to hear my… Pulse.

Every breath hurt to take, every time I moved was being stabbed with steel, white hot from the tempering process. I couldn’t keep my eyes open. I couldn’t think. I couldn’t feel. I couldn’t think of anything except… Flash.

“So please don’t take, my sunshine, away…”