to the man who carried me home
There are some songs you come across in your life and you have to turn them back on. Set them to repeat and let them flow through your brain like a virus fucking in your ear. Let it simmer down low in the wax which lasts years and could have the same dirt which Abe Lincoln’s hat caught on the eve of the Gettysburg Address.
Somewhere between Antietam and Fort Sumter the You from a past life found his soul, fighting for his rights or fighting for a united land. Either way it doesn’t matter, he’s dead.
But think about that dirt on his shoes, catching the vibrations from the old Battle Hymn of the Republic, the Star Spangled Francis Scott-Key didn’t know what it was that he’d done, written a song which would last until we could never get sick of it on 9/11. And in the dust of those towers we still remember what we wanted and all the things we forgot to pick up from the store the night before, and the all the prayers we said in our beds the night after.
Somewhere between 2001 and 2008 our ears must have caught those prayers, and they’re still there. Are you still praying? Praying for what? There’s no point in lying, all the dirt’s the same and the wood’s only a little cleaner, no difference except clean rooms make it hard for us to breathe when we go outside. The doctors say our lungs hate dust because we don’t get enough. What’s funny is, all that dust comes from us so we’re allergic to ourselves.
I remember being allergic to myself all these years. It hurts and it sucks and after awhile you get sick of it and write down “I want to die, I can’t take this anymore” on an index card and give it to your Sophomore-year Geometry teacher. He served in the Gulf War as an artilleryman and he knew exactly what to do, always so high-strung. But he’s a great man and he might have saved your life.
You came to him because he once told you the story of the war, carrying hundred-weight shells to be loaded and fired on lands hundreds of miles away. And you knew that if you fell right there, on that battlefield between high school and life and being allergic to the dust-that-is-you, that he’d be able to carry you all the way home, through all the miles and the August heat, and the November cold and through the Spring, and you’d rest in your bed collecting dust, choking until one day you could finally breathe again. And he might have saved your life, but it’s always so hard to tell.
