The wall...

It was near the end. The end of the middle anyway. We were on our second of three field exercises so we could feel the obstacles between us and freedom disappearing one by one. The last night of the exercise was something called "NIC At Night": a low-crawling experience across several football fields with fifty-cals flying overhead and explosions and flares all around. We had witnessed the pyrotechnics a couple times from our campsite but that had only left us more frightened. It's a funny thing in the army that some things that are considered "too easy" are the more dangerous and then others are covered in precautions but are hardly less dangerous than walking down the street. My impression was that this event was probably both more and less dangerous than we were being told. The drill sergeants were jittery with nervousness when they took us down to the holding area for the event and there were ambulances standing by. Now, let me be perfectly clear, the rounds to be shot over our heads, though live rounds, were also to be fired considerably above anybody's head. Even if the tallest person were to stand up, most likely they would be fine. It was the "most likely" that was a problem for all of us. When speaking of a weapon such as the fifty-cal, one is either entirely safe or entirely unsafe. If the weapon on the tower were to slip or a round was to misfire, if anything were to go wrong, in other words, someone was going to get hurt. The field was going to be covered from one end to the other with people crawling their way to the too far finish line. All of this was enough to cause the more introspective of us to consider mortality and the meaning of life and the less introspective to chatter nervously about how many chicks they were going to fuck once they got out of this hellhole. All pretty much the same when you think about it. Anyway, our turn to conquer the field came suddenly after a seemingly endless wait. Our joints were stiff from sitting in the cold and from having been smoked rather consistently the past two days in the field. We were led single file into a deep concrete trench and told to lean facefirst on the wall lining the field of terror. And then we waited again, cold and afraid. The fear felt like dark liquid swimming in that trench, and my own fear fed with the masses. But we had too much time at that wall for the fear to stay in one place. It grew and then it changed. I felt the what-ifs run through me along lines of adrenaline and then they came to a sudden stop as the words became conscious. Really, what if. And then I thought of faces and feelings and beauty. I thought of Tom and of love unhoped for. And I saw myself leaning against this unforgiving wall with danger creating the image of death in my head. When it came down to the question of, "what if this is it, what if I have no more memories," my fear was gone.

I thought back to several years before when I had been steeped in the iciness of ending myself and the terror I had created for myself in those days. I thought of the winter river I had planned to drown myself in because I was tired of making memories and I hated the life I had lived to that point. Not that there was much to hate. There was plenty of shit mistaken for love and mistaken for achievement, but there was abundant beauty always. I just couldn't get my eyes open. That is, I couldn't open them until I found my vision filled with water and depths from which I would never recover. In the end, I couldn't go through with it of course. More people loved me than I knew, including myself surprisingly. And I made a decision at that time: I decided that I would live and really or I would indeed kill myself. After that moment a number of things happened. First things got much much worse. Everybody was scared of what I had almost done and several detached completely. There was really no one that felt comfortable around me for a while and it was incredibly difficult to live in my skin. But I kept breathing and I resisted the urge to hop on one of the trains running by our school every day and leave forever. Then I went to England for a while and found myself smiling more than I had since I was a child. I came home and I started playing piano again and then I found Tom. There were days that I just let pass by of course, but generally I was living. More importantly I was loving and letting myself be loved.

These things came to me in a series of images and half-seen feelings with the concrete cold and gritty against my face and palms. I turned to one of my friends standing near me in the trench and I said, "I'm satisfied." She smiled without understanding, but it didn't matter. For a moment we were both smiling at each other and then the siren to begin our climb to the field sounded.