Service

Service

The war was over, the job was done, and his father was free.

However, was his father really free? He wondered, ever so often, if the war inside of his dad’s head ever ended. Although his service was completed far long ago, every morning he seemed to be equipped to go fight off a battle no other could come along with.

He had heard the stories, of course, the nights spent in the beige sooty tents, the walls blackened and smudged with a varying assort of molecules that one would never choose to truly research. He heard of the thinly coveted white beds, the shells that ricocheted like lullabies in the night, and the explosions that shook a man’s chest like a mother rocking its own child.

His father had never been the same after completing his service, the way his hands shook whenever he picked up a plate, or the way he sometimes woke from the night and walked throughout the house with his eyes more hollow than a chocolate Easter bunny and a pale, ghostly look, mirrored onto his face. His sorrow plastered on to every surface in the house, the intrinsic depth of his sorrow and grief of the years, and the life, he had lost overseas. He was scared for his father, the fear manifesting in the pit of his stomach, as he watched his father flinch at the sound of the door slamming, and the way a car engine riled up on the freeway.

They commended him; they told him the words most everyone wanted to hear – however as the thinly veiled words of encouragement was thrown at his father’s brick wall of a mind, he wondered at all if the words ever won against his father’s built-up weaponry that blasted them to bits. He seemed empty and dull as he took these compliments, as if the kinds words would never really be able to patch up the gaping wound that had surfaced in the burrows of his heart. The damage was so thick and wide, that the skeletal remains were all that could be seen – the only thing keeping him upright evident and bare to the other occupancies of his body.

Sometimes, however, his dad came back.

The thick white signs on popsicle wood sticks standing in the middle of busy streets, demanding for the attention they deserve in a peaceful way where the concrete does not shatter with the weight of one’s decision. The fight for strong politicians, who stand on a single podium and protect those who can not reach the microphone. The stumbling children, walking the bright-lighted hallways of high schools, battling against embedded racism and sexism on an everyday basis.

Sometimes, he loses his dad, however sometimes, he’s able to remind him that today there are more fighting with him.