Warmth

When I joined the Air Force, the world started ending.

I'm sitting here with my hot toddy, thinking back. Hot toddies tend to do that, you know. Send you back somewhere warm, somewhere sweet, with bite.

I can see how it could have been selfish of me.

To throw my hands up in the air and say, "I give up! I'm sorry, but I'm through trying to be better." To give up pretending that everything was alright, and in doing so, obliterate the fragile thing that might have been a home.

But that's not quite right, is it?

"We worked so hard for you, and this is what you've done."

I left the Air Force for a number of reasons. Some were true. Most were not. I still can't sort it out.

All I know is that it's left me with a gaping what-if the size of a B-52.

And for that, there is anger. A feeling of entitlement, that something I was had been stolen.

"What do you have to say for yourself?"

Before the Air Force, things weren't great, and it's not as if I didn't know that. But I'd found safety in my little world of responsibility, dutifully straightening myself out, congratulating myself for my responsibility and dutiful straightening out. I was a good person. Everyone was good people.

I'd thought I'd made the right decision, absolving obligation.

"There's nothing for you here."

But I'd failed to realize that that obligation was the cornerstone upon which the house stood. With that gone, how then could I possibly make the house a home?

"Why?"

So I went, heaping burning coals.

"Who gave you the right to ask questions?"

Righteously, I kept to the straight and narrower because I knew that if I even paused to think about the hurt, I'd never start again. I'd set myself on this path. I had. Alone. This was mine, all mine.

But, of course, things never work out that way.

Over the course of a few days, everything and nothing had changed. I was just a college student, grafting for the grade, keeping my head down, avoiding the track on Tuesday and Friday mornings, looking away when I passed anyone in BDUs.

I still exist in this strange in-between. It's easy to convince myself that nothing's changed. I get up early, shake off melancholy, go run, do my sets at the gym to AFPFT standards, do my weights, come back, check my email, ignore some, respond to some, and then go about my day.

But at night, I sit here with my hot toddy and dream about other things as the whiskey burns its way past a thousand pinched mirrors. I'm still trying to repay a debt I never owed.

And so the world's ended, and I'm left sorting through the fragments of what's left, salvaging what I might once have been. I might have liked writing at one point. Had I been a writer? I consume music like I run, endlessly, for no reason, with an unapologetic disregard for everything else. Had I been a musician? A runner? Or am I just another drunk, weaving through yesterday's headlines?

I have a responsibility here. Duty. An obligation. Somewhere.


"My mother always told me that when you have children, they will grow up and stab you in the back. And she was right. That's exactly what you've done."