Dear Mother,
YOU ASKED ME to write you while I was away. I’m sorry that I didn’t. However, enough time has passed since I went back to school that I can now tell you mostly everything in one letter (and I’m only a few states away now, so I can save money on postage). You’re probably expecting me to go on about how I’m doing and if I’m eating healthily and all that stuff mothers always want to hear, but I figure that this is a great opportunity to practice my journalism skills and prove to you that my major isn’t a waste of time (at least, not yet). I was already at the house a few weeks ago, so you already know that I’m fine. I think it will be more interesting for you to hear about my friend Buckley, as it’s a story you know little-to-nothing about. I’ll try to make the language colorful (like those romance novels you’re always reading), but only as colorful as I can bear it.
------------------------------------------------------------------
ROGER BUCKLEY HAD the most unforgettable face. He had absolutely no chin, which caused the angle of his head to press his dark eyes forward. His nose rounded up like some kind of cartoon character. Most of all, he always looked angry. He was a self-described misogynist, a bitter and lonely young man, and my best friend in the Army.
It was 2017 and the outcome of the recent Presidential election guaranteed a lasting conflict with Russia. I was 18 when the war started, the perfect age to enlist. You often asked me why I joined. Dad had told me that he believed the Army was my generation’s only chance at being successful. I wish I could’ve disagreed with him, but at the time I was applying to get a degree in Online Journalism and I could tell even you were nervous about it. I figured that I’d rather pay for school with the G.I Bill than work at a coffee shop for the rest of my life.
Immediately at the start of Boot-Camp, I knew I was way over my head (you should’ve seen the Drill Instructor’s face when I said I wanted to go into Journalism, he called me some names I wasn’t aware the Military still had the ability to use). For the first week or so, I was an outcast among outcasts. I couldn’t make my bed, I couldn’t march, and I even had a hard time finding a place to sit at lunch (you can imagine how difficult making friends is when your nickname is “Buzzfeed”). It wasn’t until we got a new recruit, the previously mentioned Roger Buckley (who waited until the last second to enlist), that I was able to find common ground with someone. Buckley was as (if not, more) unprepared for war as I was. We instantly became friends. Together, we could survive Boot-Camp and ready ourselves for war. It was Us vs. Them vs. Them.
Now, you’re probably wondering to yourself, “What was that he said earlier about Buckley being a misogynist?”. Well, that is where the real story begins. After Boot-Camp, we were sent to a base on an island outside Japan. For many weeks, we had little to do other than file monotonous reports and (sorry, mom) smoke. I mean, technically we were too young to smoke (the tobacco age had recently been raised to 21), but I’d be damned it I was going to War without some kind of vice. I’m patriotic, but not that patriotic. Anyways, each day, after dinner, we walked out, sat on the shore, and smoked. It was pretty damn poetic, with the Sunset and all that. Eventually, we got to talking about life back home. That’s when I got to know about Buckley’s feeling towards people, politics, and, well, life in general. The following is what I know about Buckley’s life, the most chronological I can make it.
---------------------------------------------------------
BUCKLEY WAS THE son to a single-mother, coming from a long line of single-mothers. Turns out his father, grandfather, great-grandfather, and so on had all died young in the Army. Buckley had been the only boy in the family, the first boy born into the family for all those generations. His mother didn’t know what to do, and his grand-mother couldn’t help her. So, she did what most unprepared parents do: She plopped him down in front of the TV and sent him to public school. If she couldn’t raise him, Society would. That’s all he told me about his childhood, as the rest of the story happens during his last two years in High School.
So, Buckley walks into first period on the first day of Sophomore year and that’s where he meets the love of his life. A girl named Brooke Ellison. His senior by one year (a junior), Buckley would not get the courage to speak to her until a few weeks later, when they were both assigned to the same project (He never went into specifics about what class it was. I’m thinking Chemistry?). They hit it off well and not long after, Buckley was deep in love. She was sweet, he often told me, “you could describe every part of her with that one word.” Not long after, they started to hang out regularly, but they only hung out, which caused Buckley a lot of frustration. “Hanging out meant going somewhere and doing something”, he told me, “I just wanted to sit and be. I only wanted to exist next to her.” He asked her out (on a date, not to hang out after a few months of this, but she rejected him.
I’d like to take this moment to pause the story and set the record straight for poor Buckley. I am well aware of the adjectives I used to describe him earlier, but you must understand that he was not always that way. Buckley made this absolutely clear to me. He used to be an extrovert. He was not some greasy-haired nerd. He was just like any other young boy. The only problem was that he had no father to give him advice and his mother was so indifferent to him that he was never told “no”. I don’t blame her, however, because whenever I acted spoiled as a child, you always threaten to tell Dad. Buckley’s mother had no such option.
Brooke, as sweet as she was, made two dire mistakes (that, I’m ashamed to say, I’ve fallen in the past as well). She continued to hang out with Buckley strictly as friends (poor soul!), and she regularly took to Twitter to complain about her depression, receiving Buckley’s compliments and words of encouragement with the feigned gratitude of a Telemarketer thanking someone for their time. These two seeds, once planted, grew Buckley’s affection for Brooke with staggering speed. Eventually, she seemed to him almost inhuman in her beauty. Her imperfections were like the mistakes of a master artist, in that they seemed to Buckley to be doors of discovery, mistakes only on the surface, carefully crafted by the subconscious to reveal deeper layers of beauty. Every day after school, he sat on the left side of the bus, so he could catch a glimpse of her walking home. She was like the Moon, as bright as the Sun, lighting up the quiet isolation that of his night. However, much like the Moon, she provided him with no warmth, only providing enough light to see how expansive the darkness truly was. She appeared to him at school, on social media, in his dreams, but he could never reach out and touch her. She was like a ghost, haunting his every thought. The tormented young Buckley spent each day planning out their conversations beforehand, so that he could get the most of their 30 seconds passing each other in the halls. Brooke, on the other hand, had no idea of this. She thought of Buckley as just an underclassman who she was friendly with (I don’t actually know if she thought this, that’s just what Buckley told me).
One day, while hanging out at Brooke’s house, Buckley tried once more to confess his love to her. This time, she reacted without concern for his feelings (not that I blame her, though). She told him that she didn’t feel safe around him and that it was best if they didn’t see each other for a while. I imagine she must’ve attributed his affection to a more sinister kind of longing, lust. As I said before, I don’t blame her, that’s the society we live in, however, I disagree with her assumption. Buckley had always been kind of old-fashioned in his pursuit of the passions. What he wanted from her, at least it seems to me, was in no way physical. I asked him once what he hoped to gain from her if she returned his affection, he said, “I wanted her to, when she smiled at me, smile with all parts of her face. Particularly her eyes. They were a lovely shade of green.” Buckley, too ashamed to call his mother for a ride, walked home from Brooke’s house. That was a 5 mile walk. In his arms he carried a big bag of Taco Bell that he had bought for them to share. It rotted under his bed for several months. The morning after, he would lay in bed for hours, quietly wishing he was dying of some kind of unknown disease. He imagined she’d be crying over him, proclaiming that she’d made a huge mistake. He continued to do this while in the Army, he would set his alarm a few hours early just so he could.
This was Buckley’s downfall. When he looked around school to see couples laughing as they walked past him, he thought of himself as weak, underdeveloped, broken. And so, like a child throwing away his stuffed animals in a half-baked act of independence, Buckley sought to completely drop Brooke from his life. He blocked her on all social media, sat on the right side of the bus, changed his Hallway route, and forced all thoughts of her out of his mind. This was not enough, however, as he continued, when unable to sleep, to squint his eyes in the darkness to see if he could trick his mind to see her form at the end of his bed.
An anger grew within him, showing itself firstly on social media, where he went out of his way to start arguments. He began to focus his energies on memorising data, statistics, counter-arguments, all against what he believed was the Feminist Ideology. He saw himself as the only sane man in an insane world, a leader in the fight against the forces of Political Correctness. Not since the Great Thomas Jefferson had there been a man so determined in his battle against all forms of tyranny over the mind of Man (correction: over the minds of men). However, this creed was not sworn upon the altar of any God, nor the glory of any Republic, but in the mere pursuit of self-gratification. Buckley no longer knew anything Holy, since his Virgin Mary had been defiled. He knew no power in neither Heaven nor Earth that could get in his way. In short, he became a huge asshole. He loved it, this brand he had been given: “misogynist”, it felt like the missing link in his life.
Now, he continued with this label when he eventually joined the Army, but I really don’t think he was one. He ranted about women, obviously, but he was never violently angry, just frustrated. He thought of them like corrupted spirits, aimlessly following trends in search of something real, something that he thought he had, but refused to provide them. One time, I told him about how in India, women are forced to walk a few feet behind their husbands. He was visibly upset by this.
Personally, I think he used the label of misogyny as a way to justify why he was rejected by Brooke, why his mother never gave him attention, he told himself that he was just a misogynist by nature and none of it was his fault. He grew to worship manliness, without ever really knowing what it was. He was sloppy, rude, and stubborn. He thought of himself as a modern Diogenes. His chest-beating Tarzan pseudo-manliness was his true calling, this was his destiny. That’s why he joined the Army: destiny. After all, is it not the true purpose of men to fight for the glory and protection of their home? This was the start of his new obsession, Patriotism. This is the only obsession I’ve seen first-hand. The day before we shipped out, Buckley recited to me the entire Declaration of Independance. The whole floor showed up to listen. It was moving. Fast forward a few weeks, me and Buckley were sitting on the shore smoking when we saw helicopters flying in. We were being sent to war.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
AS OF ME WRITING this, not enough time has past since this mission, so I’m afraid I’ll have to leave out most names and places. Essentially, we were going Boots On The Ground, under the cover of night and a few drones, to reach this one checkpoint. At this checkpoint, we were supposed to meet up with another group, who’d help us move to a certain town that we believed was constructing a certain kind of weapon which I can’t describe here (sorry, I don’t make the rules). We headed out at around 2 in the morning (I would call it 0200 hours, but I have more respect for you than that), Buckley walking a few feet behind me. I made few jokes about him being like those women from India, but he pretended not to hear me. We made some good progress, reaching about halfway to our goal, when we started to have problems. Turns out the Russians somehow found what frequency we were radioing on and jammed the connection. Shortly afterward, our drones started falling out of the sky, then our GPS stopped working. We were completely in the dark, but we moved on. Like our ancestors from wars past we traversed through the night, guided only by the stars and the light of the Moon. We traveled 15 miles like this. It’s funny to think that only a few months ago we couldn’t leave the house without Smartphones, but instinct had kicked in. That’s when the gas hit.
A shout came from the front of the group, ordering us to put on our gas-masks, followed by cries to take cover. A bombshell landed severals meters behind me. I was thrown forward, shrapnel nearing striking my right shoulder. Struggling to get up in a daze, I realised I forgot to put on my mask. With great, clumsy force, I ripped open my bag and slapped my gas-mask on. Before tightening the bands, I could faintly smell it, a fierce burning that reached all the way down my nostrils. I could feel it in every part of my chest. Like there was an animal trapped in my lungs, frantically clawing at the walls that enclosed it. Immediately, I was pulled up by someone and pushed forward. We had to keep moving. All screaming was kept quiet, whether by a powerful, patriotic discipline, or maybe it was simply drowned out by the sound of our firearms, but we continued nethertheless. I knew where I had to go and I ran to it. In my tunnel-vision, I couldn’t see any of my comrades, only feeling their footsteps in the shaking Earth. The rest I can’t remember. I made it to the checkpoint and laid down on the cold dirt. My gas-mask still on, I stared at the foreign ceiling as the ground slowly stole the heat from my body. Eventually, I looked around and realised I had no idea where Buckley was.
The next morning, we combed through the woods and looked for bodies. There I found Buckley lying on his back, He had the most unforgettable face. Choked by the gas, his dark eyes were pressed forward, facing the sky. What happened? Where was his mask? Well, after a few days, someone finally spoke up. A soldier (whose name I will not immortalise in this text) had been closer to the explosion than I was. As a result of the flying shrapnel, his gas-mask had been damaged. In an act of pure instinct and natural selection that would make Darwin proud, this soldier overpowered Buckley and stole his mask. He left him to die in the cold, moonless night. What hurt me most about this story was that Buckley did not die for any of the reasons that had hoped. He never gained the pity of Brooke, he was never proven right in his arguments, he had no greater glory or purpose within the history of his country. With his death, every statistic Buckley had memorised, all his love, passion, and hatred had vanished entirely from the Earth. Buckley died simply because he was in somebody’s way. And that is something I can never get out of my mind. I never went to his funeral, I didn’t want to know who attended. However, I heard from a friend that Buckley’s gravestone had finished off the final row of a section at Arlington that for so long had been asymmetrical. It must’ve been beautiful to see, if only for aesthetic purposes.
A few months later, a simple exchange of funds between politicians ended the war. All of our efforts were rendered meaningless and I was sent home. After many quiet nights of microwavable dinners and sitting in front of the TV, I decided to start college again. I flew out to Boston to major in Journalism (thanks, G.I. Bill).
First period on the first day of school gave me the greatest shock of my life. Among the attendance was none other than the famous Brooke Ellison. Buckley told me she was from this area, but I never thought I’d meet the girl. For the whole day, I avoided even looking at her. She seemed to me like a Medusa, turning men to stone. Eventually, I sneaked a gaze and what I saw completely ripped me to shreds. She was smiling. She was laughing with her friends. She had no idea what happened to Buckley after High School.
That was the truth most difficult to take. Like a student starting school in September, associating Autumn only with friends and holidays, Brooke had been blissfully unaware of the death which surrounded her. The leaves withered, the air grew cold, and animals went into hiding, but Brooke saw only the start of a new year in college, filled with discovery and wonder. But it wasn’t so easy for me. I had, like the childish young Buckley, grew to see people and places as like ghosts, meandering along in their empty pursuits, filling out the homogeneous routines of their lives as civilians. I was an outsider again, and I still am.
Buckley had, in his final weeks, found comfort in the idea that once a man reaches a certain age, he is obligated to leave childish things behind. I know now that they don’t disappear once you reach that age. They follow from behind, like those women from India. However, if Buckley’s life had taught me anything, these feelings will surely pass. I’ll move on, hopefully. Until then, I’ll just work.
That’s about it, I guess. Sorry if this letter is too long. It’s late, late and the Moon is very high in the sky. I must go to bed. I have class tomorrow. Goodnight, goodnight, goodnight!
Boston
Autumn 2018
YOU ASKED ME to write you while I was away. I’m sorry that I didn’t. However, enough time has passed since I went back to school that I can now tell you mostly everything in one letter (and I’m only a few states away now, so I can save money on postage). You’re probably expecting me to go on about how I’m doing and if I’m eating healthily and all that stuff mothers always want to hear, but I figure that this is a great opportunity to practice my journalism skills and prove to you that my major isn’t a waste of time (at least, not yet). I was already at the house a few weeks ago, so you already know that I’m fine. I think it will be more interesting for you to hear about my friend Buckley, as it’s a story you know little-to-nothing about. I’ll try to make the language colorful (like those romance novels you’re always reading), but only as colorful as I can bear it.
------------------------------------------------------------------
ROGER BUCKLEY HAD the most unforgettable face. He had absolutely no chin, which caused the angle of his head to press his dark eyes forward. His nose rounded up like some kind of cartoon character. Most of all, he always looked angry. He was a self-described misogynist, a bitter and lonely young man, and my best friend in the Army.
It was 2017 and the outcome of the recent Presidential election guaranteed a lasting conflict with Russia. I was 18 when the war started, the perfect age to enlist. You often asked me why I joined. Dad had told me that he believed the Army was my generation’s only chance at being successful. I wish I could’ve disagreed with him, but at the time I was applying to get a degree in Online Journalism and I could tell even you were nervous about it. I figured that I’d rather pay for school with the G.I Bill than work at a coffee shop for the rest of my life.
Immediately at the start of Boot-Camp, I knew I was way over my head (you should’ve seen the Drill Instructor’s face when I said I wanted to go into Journalism, he called me some names I wasn’t aware the Military still had the ability to use). For the first week or so, I was an outcast among outcasts. I couldn’t make my bed, I couldn’t march, and I even had a hard time finding a place to sit at lunch (you can imagine how difficult making friends is when your nickname is “Buzzfeed”). It wasn’t until we got a new recruit, the previously mentioned Roger Buckley (who waited until the last second to enlist), that I was able to find common ground with someone. Buckley was as (if not, more) unprepared for war as I was. We instantly became friends. Together, we could survive Boot-Camp and ready ourselves for war. It was Us vs. Them vs. Them.
Now, you’re probably wondering to yourself, “What was that he said earlier about Buckley being a misogynist?”. Well, that is where the real story begins. After Boot-Camp, we were sent to a base on an island outside Japan. For many weeks, we had little to do other than file monotonous reports and (sorry, mom) smoke. I mean, technically we were too young to smoke (the tobacco age had recently been raised to 21), but I’d be damned it I was going to War without some kind of vice. I’m patriotic, but not that patriotic. Anyways, each day, after dinner, we walked out, sat on the shore, and smoked. It was pretty damn poetic, with the Sunset and all that. Eventually, we got to talking about life back home. That’s when I got to know about Buckley’s feeling towards people, politics, and, well, life in general. The following is what I know about Buckley’s life, the most chronological I can make it.
---------------------------------------------------------
BUCKLEY WAS THE son to a single-mother, coming from a long line of single-mothers. Turns out his father, grandfather, great-grandfather, and so on had all died young in the Army. Buckley had been the only boy in the family, the first boy born into the family for all those generations. His mother didn’t know what to do, and his grand-mother couldn’t help her. So, she did what most unprepared parents do: She plopped him down in front of the TV and sent him to public school. If she couldn’t raise him, Society would. That’s all he told me about his childhood, as the rest of the story happens during his last two years in High School.
So, Buckley walks into first period on the first day of Sophomore year and that’s where he meets the love of his life. A girl named Brooke Ellison. His senior by one year (a junior), Buckley would not get the courage to speak to her until a few weeks later, when they were both assigned to the same project (He never went into specifics about what class it was. I’m thinking Chemistry?). They hit it off well and not long after, Buckley was deep in love. She was sweet, he often told me, “you could describe every part of her with that one word.” Not long after, they started to hang out regularly, but they only hung out, which caused Buckley a lot of frustration. “Hanging out meant going somewhere and doing something”, he told me, “I just wanted to sit and be. I only wanted to exist next to her.” He asked her out (on a date, not to hang out after a few months of this, but she rejected him.
I’d like to take this moment to pause the story and set the record straight for poor Buckley. I am well aware of the adjectives I used to describe him earlier, but you must understand that he was not always that way. Buckley made this absolutely clear to me. He used to be an extrovert. He was not some greasy-haired nerd. He was just like any other young boy. The only problem was that he had no father to give him advice and his mother was so indifferent to him that he was never told “no”. I don’t blame her, however, because whenever I acted spoiled as a child, you always threaten to tell Dad. Buckley’s mother had no such option.
Brooke, as sweet as she was, made two dire mistakes (that, I’m ashamed to say, I’ve fallen in the past as well). She continued to hang out with Buckley strictly as friends (poor soul!), and she regularly took to Twitter to complain about her depression, receiving Buckley’s compliments and words of encouragement with the feigned gratitude of a Telemarketer thanking someone for their time. These two seeds, once planted, grew Buckley’s affection for Brooke with staggering speed. Eventually, she seemed to him almost inhuman in her beauty. Her imperfections were like the mistakes of a master artist, in that they seemed to Buckley to be doors of discovery, mistakes only on the surface, carefully crafted by the subconscious to reveal deeper layers of beauty. Every day after school, he sat on the left side of the bus, so he could catch a glimpse of her walking home. She was like the Moon, as bright as the Sun, lighting up the quiet isolation that of his night. However, much like the Moon, she provided him with no warmth, only providing enough light to see how expansive the darkness truly was. She appeared to him at school, on social media, in his dreams, but he could never reach out and touch her. She was like a ghost, haunting his every thought. The tormented young Buckley spent each day planning out their conversations beforehand, so that he could get the most of their 30 seconds passing each other in the halls. Brooke, on the other hand, had no idea of this. She thought of Buckley as just an underclassman who she was friendly with (I don’t actually know if she thought this, that’s just what Buckley told me).
One day, while hanging out at Brooke’s house, Buckley tried once more to confess his love to her. This time, she reacted without concern for his feelings (not that I blame her, though). She told him that she didn’t feel safe around him and that it was best if they didn’t see each other for a while. I imagine she must’ve attributed his affection to a more sinister kind of longing, lust. As I said before, I don’t blame her, that’s the society we live in, however, I disagree with her assumption. Buckley had always been kind of old-fashioned in his pursuit of the passions. What he wanted from her, at least it seems to me, was in no way physical. I asked him once what he hoped to gain from her if she returned his affection, he said, “I wanted her to, when she smiled at me, smile with all parts of her face. Particularly her eyes. They were a lovely shade of green.” Buckley, too ashamed to call his mother for a ride, walked home from Brooke’s house. That was a 5 mile walk. In his arms he carried a big bag of Taco Bell that he had bought for them to share. It rotted under his bed for several months. The morning after, he would lay in bed for hours, quietly wishing he was dying of some kind of unknown disease. He imagined she’d be crying over him, proclaiming that she’d made a huge mistake. He continued to do this while in the Army, he would set his alarm a few hours early just so he could.
This was Buckley’s downfall. When he looked around school to see couples laughing as they walked past him, he thought of himself as weak, underdeveloped, broken. And so, like a child throwing away his stuffed animals in a half-baked act of independence, Buckley sought to completely drop Brooke from his life. He blocked her on all social media, sat on the right side of the bus, changed his Hallway route, and forced all thoughts of her out of his mind. This was not enough, however, as he continued, when unable to sleep, to squint his eyes in the darkness to see if he could trick his mind to see her form at the end of his bed.
An anger grew within him, showing itself firstly on social media, where he went out of his way to start arguments. He began to focus his energies on memorising data, statistics, counter-arguments, all against what he believed was the Feminist Ideology. He saw himself as the only sane man in an insane world, a leader in the fight against the forces of Political Correctness. Not since the Great Thomas Jefferson had there been a man so determined in his battle against all forms of tyranny over the mind of Man (correction: over the minds of men). However, this creed was not sworn upon the altar of any God, nor the glory of any Republic, but in the mere pursuit of self-gratification. Buckley no longer knew anything Holy, since his Virgin Mary had been defiled. He knew no power in neither Heaven nor Earth that could get in his way. In short, he became a huge asshole. He loved it, this brand he had been given: “misogynist”, it felt like the missing link in his life.
Now, he continued with this label when he eventually joined the Army, but I really don’t think he was one. He ranted about women, obviously, but he was never violently angry, just frustrated. He thought of them like corrupted spirits, aimlessly following trends in search of something real, something that he thought he had, but refused to provide them. One time, I told him about how in India, women are forced to walk a few feet behind their husbands. He was visibly upset by this.
Personally, I think he used the label of misogyny as a way to justify why he was rejected by Brooke, why his mother never gave him attention, he told himself that he was just a misogynist by nature and none of it was his fault. He grew to worship manliness, without ever really knowing what it was. He was sloppy, rude, and stubborn. He thought of himself as a modern Diogenes. His chest-beating Tarzan pseudo-manliness was his true calling, this was his destiny. That’s why he joined the Army: destiny. After all, is it not the true purpose of men to fight for the glory and protection of their home? This was the start of his new obsession, Patriotism. This is the only obsession I’ve seen first-hand. The day before we shipped out, Buckley recited to me the entire Declaration of Independance. The whole floor showed up to listen. It was moving. Fast forward a few weeks, me and Buckley were sitting on the shore smoking when we saw helicopters flying in. We were being sent to war.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
AS OF ME WRITING this, not enough time has past since this mission, so I’m afraid I’ll have to leave out most names and places. Essentially, we were going Boots On The Ground, under the cover of night and a few drones, to reach this one checkpoint. At this checkpoint, we were supposed to meet up with another group, who’d help us move to a certain town that we believed was constructing a certain kind of weapon which I can’t describe here (sorry, I don’t make the rules). We headed out at around 2 in the morning (I would call it 0200 hours, but I have more respect for you than that), Buckley walking a few feet behind me. I made few jokes about him being like those women from India, but he pretended not to hear me. We made some good progress, reaching about halfway to our goal, when we started to have problems. Turns out the Russians somehow found what frequency we were radioing on and jammed the connection. Shortly afterward, our drones started falling out of the sky, then our GPS stopped working. We were completely in the dark, but we moved on. Like our ancestors from wars past we traversed through the night, guided only by the stars and the light of the Moon. We traveled 15 miles like this. It’s funny to think that only a few months ago we couldn’t leave the house without Smartphones, but instinct had kicked in. That’s when the gas hit.
A shout came from the front of the group, ordering us to put on our gas-masks, followed by cries to take cover. A bombshell landed severals meters behind me. I was thrown forward, shrapnel nearing striking my right shoulder. Struggling to get up in a daze, I realised I forgot to put on my mask. With great, clumsy force, I ripped open my bag and slapped my gas-mask on. Before tightening the bands, I could faintly smell it, a fierce burning that reached all the way down my nostrils. I could feel it in every part of my chest. Like there was an animal trapped in my lungs, frantically clawing at the walls that enclosed it. Immediately, I was pulled up by someone and pushed forward. We had to keep moving. All screaming was kept quiet, whether by a powerful, patriotic discipline, or maybe it was simply drowned out by the sound of our firearms, but we continued nethertheless. I knew where I had to go and I ran to it. In my tunnel-vision, I couldn’t see any of my comrades, only feeling their footsteps in the shaking Earth. The rest I can’t remember. I made it to the checkpoint and laid down on the cold dirt. My gas-mask still on, I stared at the foreign ceiling as the ground slowly stole the heat from my body. Eventually, I looked around and realised I had no idea where Buckley was.
The next morning, we combed through the woods and looked for bodies. There I found Buckley lying on his back, He had the most unforgettable face. Choked by the gas, his dark eyes were pressed forward, facing the sky. What happened? Where was his mask? Well, after a few days, someone finally spoke up. A soldier (whose name I will not immortalise in this text) had been closer to the explosion than I was. As a result of the flying shrapnel, his gas-mask had been damaged. In an act of pure instinct and natural selection that would make Darwin proud, this soldier overpowered Buckley and stole his mask. He left him to die in the cold, moonless night. What hurt me most about this story was that Buckley did not die for any of the reasons that had hoped. He never gained the pity of Brooke, he was never proven right in his arguments, he had no greater glory or purpose within the history of his country. With his death, every statistic Buckley had memorised, all his love, passion, and hatred had vanished entirely from the Earth. Buckley died simply because he was in somebody’s way. And that is something I can never get out of my mind. I never went to his funeral, I didn’t want to know who attended. However, I heard from a friend that Buckley’s gravestone had finished off the final row of a section at Arlington that for so long had been asymmetrical. It must’ve been beautiful to see, if only for aesthetic purposes.
A few months later, a simple exchange of funds between politicians ended the war. All of our efforts were rendered meaningless and I was sent home. After many quiet nights of microwavable dinners and sitting in front of the TV, I decided to start college again. I flew out to Boston to major in Journalism (thanks, G.I. Bill).
First period on the first day of school gave me the greatest shock of my life. Among the attendance was none other than the famous Brooke Ellison. Buckley told me she was from this area, but I never thought I’d meet the girl. For the whole day, I avoided even looking at her. She seemed to me like a Medusa, turning men to stone. Eventually, I sneaked a gaze and what I saw completely ripped me to shreds. She was smiling. She was laughing with her friends. She had no idea what happened to Buckley after High School.
That was the truth most difficult to take. Like a student starting school in September, associating Autumn only with friends and holidays, Brooke had been blissfully unaware of the death which surrounded her. The leaves withered, the air grew cold, and animals went into hiding, but Brooke saw only the start of a new year in college, filled with discovery and wonder. But it wasn’t so easy for me. I had, like the childish young Buckley, grew to see people and places as like ghosts, meandering along in their empty pursuits, filling out the homogeneous routines of their lives as civilians. I was an outsider again, and I still am.
Buckley had, in his final weeks, found comfort in the idea that once a man reaches a certain age, he is obligated to leave childish things behind. I know now that they don’t disappear once you reach that age. They follow from behind, like those women from India. However, if Buckley’s life had taught me anything, these feelings will surely pass. I’ll move on, hopefully. Until then, I’ll just work.
That’s about it, I guess. Sorry if this letter is too long. It’s late, late and the Moon is very high in the sky. I must go to bed. I have class tomorrow. Goodnight, goodnight, goodnight!
Boston
Autumn 2018