The Scattered and the Dead (Book 2.6) by L.T. Vargus & Tim McBain

Author:L.T. Vargus & Tim McBain [Vargus, L.T.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Smarmy Press
Published: 2018-07-26T22:00:00+00:00

Jeremiah

Rural Maryland

10 years, 41 days after

Suicidal ideation. That’s the fancy term for picturing yourself sucking on the barrel of a gun.

I have to think all of us, the soldiers out here now, have experienced a bit of this. I know I have and do.

When the night comes on, these thoughts of suicide wash over me in waves. Strangely anesthetic. Numbing. A little cold.

Ugly pictures opening in my head. Vivid and violent. I don’t understand them. I don’t want them. But they are there.

But then maybe I do understand them in a certain way. We wander around out here for no good reason. Aimless and anchorless. Roaming out into the big nothing. Marching to nonsense orders that flit us here and there at random.

None of this makes sense.

The emptiness stares us in the face.

And when that chaos, that utter meaninglessness, spirals its way into my brain, it creates tension that cannot resolve. A melody hanging on a deeply unsatisfying end note, discordant and maddening, wanting to find its way back to a root note — a tonic — that doesn’t exist. This song sucks. It provides neither satisfaction nor relief.

There is no correct answer to this question. There is no way to compute this nonsense equation, no way to render this data into the cause and effect relationship that my mind seems to demand of all things.

It’s a restless sensation. Makes my skin tingle. Vibrates my thoughts. Pulses the words in my head into endless circles like water twirling down the drain.

No order is possible. No meaning is possible.

So we drift in empty space. Alone. Apart. Uncomfortable.

What hurts more than anything, I think, is the way these thoughts suck the meaning out of things, rip the soul out of things, leave only the surface to contemplate, an empty shell of physicality, territory, bodies. All else, if there even is anything else, hides down in the muck. Out of sight. Unknowable. And we spend a lifetime flailing after it, after anything beyond what’s here. Desperate and frightened and small.

So I sit here at night, shrouded in dark, and I point my gun out at the emptiness for no good reason. Let my finger hover over the trigger like I can kill this problem. Poke holes in its guts and make it go away. Resolve this tension that shivers and thrums in my skull and never lets me sleep. All I have to do is squeeze and it all goes away.

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