On A World That I Thought Would Last Forever But Is Now Very Much Gone

You’re little, very little, your grandfather who got drafted at the end of WW2 and spent most of his time peeling potatoes before being discharged puts disposable pie tins in the windows of the play house in the back yard and has you crouch and roll in between shooting them with your bb gun telling you that you need to kill the Germans or the Japanese who are hiding in there, which is it you can’t remember now.

You’re a little older now. The same grandfather has died a few months before the towers are hit. Your mother feels the house shake when the pentagon gets hit, but doesn’t realize what it was until she turns on the TV. You’re at school at the time. The teachers don’t roll in the TV and let you watch because it’s probably too traumatic which it is. You also find out later that two children who go to your school have lost their father somewhere in the walls of the Pentagon and later each grade in the school will sign a card offering their condolences.

You watch the footage of the towers over and over again all evening and at some point your father catches you crying silently and assures you that these are just fleas biting a big dog and some form of nebulous retribution is just on the horizon.

And it is. Quietly people depart for Afghanistan and little spooks and scamps pull dirty tricks in the mountains that you’ll read about for many years later. Anthrax is mailed out. They try to change the name of French Fries, and they do for a little while. A kid at school explains the difference between Sikhs and Muslims so he doesn’t get his ass kicked which seems to work, though everyone kind of cools on him and is now acutely aware of deeper differences between one another that the public school curriculum had, until recently, done a great job of ablating.

A little while later while getting ready for bed you notice you have exactly 3 pubic hairs. Long and straight and black you are a little shocked that you hadn’t noticed them and more shocked when you realize that this is just the beginning. The presence of these strange hairs and their attendant consequences makes the colorful kid’s bathroom you’ve used all your life seem unwelcoming and absurd. Then you go downstairs and watch the invasion of Iraq on the TV. Green and black night vision draped over strange species of armored cars which fire bright green tracer rounds and make you feel like this is tit for tat and then some.

Later your next door neighbor, a DINK in the reserves with the countenance of a 15 year old boy tells you that he needs the army toys that he let you borrow before the towers got hit because he’ll be deploying soon. You give him back his flak jacket and the spotting scope and the survival vest you ran around in the back yard wearing. He deploys several times. He writes letters and sends emails to all the worried neighbors but nothing more than a mortar attack that would have killed him were he taking a shower ever happens. He meets soldiers who are alone in the world without any family and asks families in the neighborhood to send them gifts and letters to let them know the American people care about what they’re doing. Once you get over the shock of realizing there are people who are alone in the world you think it’s odd that there are so many of them.

Then you’re at a Christian, but not too Christian, summer camp with one of your buddies who will eventually enlist and fight in this war when the only news that reaches you for all those weeks is the death of Saddam’s sons, who were bad guys apparently. A folded newspaper showing bullet riddled cars and maybe even their bodies but it’s hard to remember now is passed around, which seems like the first thing to be triumphant about during all of this even though their old man is still missing. Maybe he’s in that cave system you saw a drawing of once, with his tall buddy who is also missing, scurrying about in deep underground lobes. You stare at the newspaper in the arts and crafts cabin in late afternoon in mid summer, deep brown log cabin walls hewn by Pennsylvanian Dutch craftsmen long dead, motes of dust in the sunlight.

You start to turn into a teenager and your head grows up into your own ass and all that shit kind of fades into the background. Your neighbor deploys a few more times, who knows how many, and you move into a nicer neighborhood with better schools, whatever that means. There’s a troop surge apparently and there’s an air of seriousness over everything again even though we’re all distracted by mp3s and H2s and the construction boom that is helping everyone get a little rich.

You’re not concerned with the troop surge because you’ve found a girl who will end up ripping your heart around, once now and once again in your mid 20s, and you realize that you can’t imagine your life where none of that shit had ever happened, for better or for worse. The only surge in your world is in between your legs and you can’t think about anything else except fucking and how to fuck longer and better.

The troop surge works or maybe it doesn’t because you’re in college now (that same neighbor talked you out of enlisting at the behest of your mother) and you take smoke breaks with former troops now students who kill a cigarette in two puffs because they just got back from a world where they had to and you listen to their war stories wondering if you’d ever do anything half as interesting. That pretty Chilean girl a little older than you who you dreamed about fucking jumps off a bridge and your parents finally admit that they’re divorced over Thanksgiving which surprises no one.

One of your high school friends joins and on one of his visits home right after Go Pros come out he shows everyone footage from one of his patrols in the mountains where they got into a firefight and lost a guy. You see bullets rake the ground in front of him and he dives and returns fire. You ask him what a war feels like and he says it feels exactly like paintball up until someone gets shot and then it isn’t as fun anymore.

You work through most of your 20s, veterans seem to snake all the good jobs getting preferential treatment and sweetheart contracting gigs and are kind of like a different species compared to how you think of yourself and measure up against your friends. In college a couple people die from opiates, which is sad.

Some scenes are missing here. Apps on your phone, maybe? People going on trips? Mental breakdowns, abortions, a bunch of bullshit in between making rent. Jumping in and out of Ubers, eating small plates of food that all taste the same if you’re being honest with yourself. Everyone seems to be doing better than you and apparently its even worse if you have Instagram so be thankful you don’t.

Then right before it (your life) was all about to click a mysterious pandemic happens. The media machines that grew over our minds like fungus over the last decade are now not as chummy with us as we thought and we’d give up rideshare apps and just drink a little less if we could all make it go away.

Cities burn. No one talks about it. Everything is frozen for a year or more. More people die from opiates and jump into or out of relationships and commit suicide and just kind of seem to disappear from your life and you wonder if you did indeed fuck this up in some kind of way that you’ll only understand once it’s too late.

Then one day it’s all over. We’re out of Afghanistan and you guess we must have gotten out of Iraq while no one was paying attention. It’s weird how many times you’ve heard the word “Iraq,” a hundred thousand at least, but that seems like it never happened and you have to assume this will seem like it never happened too.

It’s hard to feel any one way about anything anymore. You just kind of check in with what your electric friends are joking about and let them do most of the feeling for you if you want. You hope you can make enough money and have a “nice enough” job and not be stopped by mysterious diseases from actually seeing your friends in person once or twice a year if the stars align. You start to feel a little sick and empty when you realize that you don’t have any stories or memories or events from your life which can’t be related back to these conflicts in some way. It just might be like this forever and you’ll end up disappearing in a spreadsheet somewhere if you’re lucky and if you’re not lucky dying on pavement somewhere on a grainy cell phone video so some kids on the internet can make fun of you for an afternoon which gives them something to do as their Adderall wears off.