19
I spent the majority of the day in bed. Only getting up when I needed to and taking my pills when it was time to. As soon as what was necessary was done, I flopped back on my bed. The mattress was too firm and was nowhere near as comfortable as Madi’s bed. Her sweet scent wasn’t anywhere, I couldn’t even smell her on me. The only thing I could smell from my sheets was my own stink and the lingering smell of motor oil. The smell of oil never seemed to leave me.
In a short amount of time, I had managed to get things going good for me. I had a girl that took a good portion of my attention. Our exchanges were easy, and after she had got used to me, she opened up like a flower. The shyness that had stilted her when I first spoke to her went away after our lunch, and I enjoyed every little conversation we had. Her voice was soft, and it warmed me just to hear her speak. There was no one here, but me. There was no conversation going on in the tiny apartment I called home. It was just me in there, laid out across my bed dwelling on the noise in my own head; by myself. I didn’t have the soft feel of her body against me, the light snore of hers to occupy the room.
I was alone. Really, I hadn’t been alone since Teddy picked me up from the bar. I made the effort to keep myself surrounded with people to keep myself distracted. The idea of people now seemed stifling. I didn’t want to go to the bar, I didn’t want, or care, to find out what happened to Jimmy. I didn’t want to face Teddy’s concern. Would he apologize for the shit he gave me when I first mentioned my concerns to them? Did I care?
Part of the problem with being alone is that there was nothing to distract me. There was nothing to keep me out of my head. I had stopped taking the antidepressants and antianxiety pills, medication that had been prescribed with the worry of PTSD. It had been a long time since I actually thought about what happened in Iraq. I spent the majority of my time in the desert working on any vehicle that was put in front of me, and I had duty like everyone else. My job had been easy and I very rarely had to fire my gun for anything other than practice. I had been tapped to drive in the caravan that would carry supplies out from the base to the village that was closest. The IED didn’t even blow under the truck I was driving. It had hit the truck that had been rolling ahead of mine, killing three of the soldiers within and crippling the others that were lucky enough to survive. The guy that rode shotgun with me had the same kind of burns that I had, though the distance from the blast made them a little less severe.
They were groups, they offered support in the form of a bunch of men and women that had been wounded. We all struggled to figure out a way to get back into life, to let go of what had been taken away from us and go back into normal society. Sometimes it was just a bunch of men and women staring each other, doped up on the drugs that they took that was supposed to help them forget what had put them there. It was supposed to help them cope, but more often than not they decided they would have been better off biting it. So they would take the matter into their own hands, for relief from the pain.
It had been what I was considering when I first met Teddy. Chewing on the nine millimeter that I kept in the closet and pulling the trigger to get relief from the pain and the noise in my head. When it was quiet in my room, and I wasn’t numbed by alcohol, I could still hear the noise of the IED exploding and the ripping of metal.
I thought that I was over this. I thought that the roar of my bike’s engine had drowned out the sound of the explosion. The pain was something I was told I’d live with the rest of my life. But, the noise and the smell of death was something that had been replaced by wind whipping in my ears and smell of the road. And all of that had been replaced in a short amount of time by the sound and feel of a girl.
I hadn’t been kidding when I told her I loved her, even though I had jumped the gun. I knew she felt something for me. If it wasn’t love, it was close to coming to it. With that gone, how was I supposed to cope now?