"I WAS HUMAN"

I am a human being.

I keep strands of worry around in my pockets; I bite my nails, I nurse my arms. I’m naturally tired, no matter how much sleep I get. New situations freak me out and I don’t want attention. I tend to be very self-centered.

Well, myself isn’t always centered. Sometimes it’s off-key, off-cue, late; dead.

But that’s all okay. I’m different from most other people, and that just makes me all the more human.

When I think of soldiers, my own is not the image that comes up. I’m not athletic, I’m twitchy, and I’m a coward. Soldiers have never translated into something human for me.

And yet, there’s a footprint of a whisper behind a coffin full of flames, working like a seashell to bring the sounds of bombing to your ears.

And it says: “I was human.”

I am not a monster.

I am not a superhero.

I am not a savage.

I am not a God.

My bones aren’t woven of a bloodbath.

You can’t find the bombs underneath my teeth.

I am a human.

There’s something untouchable about a soldier. Something that takes a pebble and adds a stone, something that makes you think of red ribbons tied onto a string of bombs: ashes, ashes, we all fall down.

That near feebleness, those pictures you get of brown-uniform-red-sky that could never make something human and whole and breathing. They’re paused in an agenda of corpses.

They have looked death in the face of every soldier. Is that all they can see when they look in the mirror?

Or was it life they see, staring back at them?

Maybe it’s just that teaspoon of courage --- or what is mistaken for courage: desperation.
They don’t look like ordinary people. There are no windshield wipers on their eyes. They don’t try to rub off the bad things. They don’t even look like corpses, preserved in their garden of underground dirt.

They look like some sort of drowned fire.

But you know they fought all the way down.

I would love to lay the wreath on the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. I would love to use the leaves to branch out into their hearts, to just connect like woodcuts down a leaf, singling us out and putting us together, and maybe we could make our hands out of branches. Green-skin-flesh-sky.

To just feel a little less human, and a little more secure in my elbows.

There are people who will tell you there is a definite line between life and death.

Soldiers aren’t human.

And maybe I’m not, either.