Tries to Forget
It’s really sort of an unfortunate story. But hey, I’m a journalist I work with sad stories every day of the week. It’s getting to the point where I’ll just cry myself to sleep over all the horrible things going on. No one seems to give a damn any more. It’s depressing.
Anyway, I was on assignment to interview a veteran. Only twenty-six years old. Depressing. Well, he was nice at first, making me tea and stuff. I had to get into the interview, but every time I tried he would stall. He played piano beautifully. He had quite an impressive video and record collection. His wife had a gorgeous garden. And they had quite a talented little dog. Yeah, he tried everything to distract me. It was kinda nice because I felt like I was with this old friend of mine and we had a lot of catching up to do. But I had a job and as much as I liked getting paid for drinking tea with an adorable twenty-eight year old, my boss wanted a story and I had to deliver. So I brought it down hard and asked him the first question.
He sort of froze up after that. All he could say was that he had nightmares of all the mistakes he made and all the friends he lost in the war. He told me he tried to commit suicide and he started mixing chemicals in the basement in the hopes one of them would kill him. Even though he married his childhood sweetheart, she just didn’t seem attractive and lovely to him anymore. That made me even more depressed because I saw a picture of her and she was beautiful. He said he tried to find things he liked doing but every piano piece he played sounded like falling shells and his dog barking sounded like gunshots. He would wake up in the middle of the night afraid something was going to come down and smash him to pieces. He hated opening up jelly jars because he thought they would explode in his face. He never ate popcorn for the same reason. Therapy wasn’t helping because he didn’t think he could leave his wife to go to California (which they couldn’t afford anyway) in order to stay in therapy full time. He didn’t have any kids and he didn’t want any, which apparently killed his wife. She wanted them pretty badly and they’d often have fights about it, but he insisted he couldn’t handle it. He told her he’d kill them if he wasn’t careful. She told him to be careful and he said he wouldn’t even try.
He said she worked as a stockbroker to sell stocks of companies that helped prolong the war. I said she didn’t mean to and he said, “all the same…”
Anyway, we were depressed at the end. I tried to get him to play again or show me some more stuff that he had, but he said he didn’t feel like it. Last I heard he was in the hospital again for attempted suicide. Depressing isn’t it?
That’s why I quite my job. That man was so happy before I had to screw up his day. So I decided to become a fiction writer instead. It’s much easier than addressing the actual pain. When someone wants to face it, they can pick up a newspaper. That’s their choice. I just don’t want to be the one to open up old wounds. It stings for everybody.
This entry was posted on Sunday, June 29th, 2008 at 10:00 am and is filed under Apocalypse, Fiction Prose, Realistic Fiction. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.