Breathe in.
Breathe out.
Breathe in.
Breathe out.
It felt so simple. To breathe with him. To lie in the grass beside him.
So, so simple.
Yet it wasn’t.
Far from it.
His presence brought a hurricane.
I’m pretty sure I fell asleep.
It was quiet. Almost too quiet. Even the birds seemed to be unnaturally silent.
No one moved. No one made a sound. It was like lying in a cemetery. As if we were all dead already.
But I tried. I really did. I thought about why David was so insistent on coming. I remembered the rapturous expression he’d get when he’d watch that same video of Jeremy Carter preaching about saving your soul.
David had been in a really bad place.
That’s what I should be thinking about. The things I wanted to change.
So I thought about how things were before we came to here.
Dave had been home from his last tour in Afghanistan. This was different than his previous leaves. Because this time was final.
He had been shoved out of the army. At one time, he had been on the right track. He was recruited into the 75thRanger Regiment. He was involved in missions that left many people dead and more people saved.
At first it was a perfect fit. David had always been smart, athletic. The top of his class, he insisted on joining the military. Our father was ex-army and he wanted to follow in his decorated footsteps.
Me, I was the artsy one going to school for a “worthless” liberal arts degree. I wanted to teach art. I wanted to hang around kids all day as they made ridiculous clay sculptures and learn about Georgia O’Keeffe and Vincent Van Gogh.
David was the smart, intense one.
I was the happy, fanciful one. The social one. The guy with all the friends and the life of the party.
But then David was sent on an emergency crisis response mission. And he watched half his team get blown up. In shock, he crawled over ten miles to get help. After that he couldn’t function and he was deemed unfit for service.
He was given an other-than-honorable discharge because of the questions raised in regards to his behavior during the mission. His superiors thought he acted in a way that put others at risk. That he was somehow at fault for his team walking into a landmine. Literally.
The overwhelming guilt and complete despair combined with hardcore depression left him spiraling. He was kicked out of the army with no benefits. His GI Bill, which he had planned to use to go to school, was taken away. He was diagnosed with an Adjustment Disorder, which was the military’s way of saying David’s issues began before that fateful day he watched his friends be killed, which was total bullshit.
It was their way of washing their hands of a problematic soldier. A man who had tried his best to serve his country.
He was sent home a shell of the person he used to be. To a family that couldn’t cope with who he had become.
He couldn’t get a job. He couldn’t be around anyone for extended periods of time. The slightest things triggered him. He’d fly into a violent rage, breaking things—even his hand once.
Then he’d stay in bed for days at a time. He wouldn’t eat. He wouldn’t talk to anyone. He slept all the time.
He’d just lie there, in his childhood bedroom in our parents’ house and stare at the ceiling. Immovable and dying inside.
