by xFadingxFaithx

“Twenty years later, I can still see the sunlight on Curt Lemon’s face. I can see him turning, looking back at Rat Kiley, then he laughed and took that curious half step from shade into sunlight, his face brown and shining, and when his foot touched down, in that instant, he must’ve thought it was the sunlight that was killing him. It was not the sunlight. It was a rigged 105 round. But if I could ever get the story right, how the sun seemed to gather around him and pick him up and lift him into that tree, if I could somehow recreate the fatal whiteness of that light, the quick glare, the obvious cause and effect, then you would believe the last thing Curt Lemon believed, which for him must’ve been the final truth. Sunlight was killing him.

Now and then, when I tell this story, someone will come up to me afterward and say she liked it. It’s always a woman. Usually it’s an older woman of kindly temperament and humane politics. She’ll explain that as a rule she hates war stories; she can’t understand why people want to wallow in all the blood and gore. But this one she liked. The poor baby buffalo, it made her sad. Sometimes, even, there are little tears. What I should do, she’ll say, is put it all behind me.

Find new stories to tell.
I won’t say it but I’ll think it.
I’ll picture Rat Kiley’s face, his grief, and I’ll think, You dumb cooze.
Because she wasn’t listening.
It wasn’t a war story. It was a love story.

But you can’t say that. All you can do is tell it one more time, patiently, adding and subtracting, making up a few things to get at the real truth. No Mitchell Sanders, you tell her. No Curt Lemon, no Rat Kiley. No baby buffalo. No trail junction. No baby buffalo. It’s all made up. Beginning to end. Every goddamn detail – the mountains and the river and especially that poor dumb baby buffalo. None of it happened. None of it. And even if it did happen, it didn’t happen in the mountains, it happened in this little village on the Batangan Peninsula, and it was raining like crazy, and one night a guy named Stink Harris woke up screaming with a leech on his tongue.

You can tell a true war story if you just keep on telling it. And in the end, of course, a true war story is never about war. It’s about sunlight. It’s about the special way that dawn spreads out on a river when you know you must cross that river and march into the mountains and do things you are afraid to do. It’s about love and memory. It’s about sorrow.

It’s about sisters who never write back and people who never listen.”

- The Things They Carried, by Tim O’Brien

It’s reading stuff like this that makes you want to write. But things feel like they’re spinning too fast for me to stop and do so. Give me a hidey-hole way out in the woods, by way of Bon Iver, none of this oppressive tropical heat but instead the sweet touch of cold, with the chill working into your bones; I want books, lots of them, coffee brewing by the pot over a wood-burning stove, sheaves of paper, noisy old typewriter, pencils and 0.28 pens; at night I will walk out the door with hands thrust in my coat pockets, watching in fascination as the cold transforms my breathing into wispy speech-bubble clouds. Open skies filled with stars, the frosty sting in your cheeks, to let my heart and spirit out to sing in the twilight, and to finally, finally, pull all these stories out from me.

“They’ll blame it all on Vietnam.

And they’ll be right. And they’ll be wrong.

I know what the world needs now. Same thing it’s needed all along.

I walk off the Brooklyn rooftop and into the future: a future full of screams and bullets, and bad men dying in the ancient dark.

And I show the world a face not made by God.”

- Garth Ennis, in Punisher: The Tyger