When the World Crashed Down
I'm little numb to the chaos around me. Maybe it was years spent beating the shit out of drums, but the sound of gunfire and screaming and the radio reverberating with commands and positions of bogies feels like background noise to my life.
I'm in the middle of the fucking desert, shooting at a bunch of guys who are shooting right back at me. I'm jaded; disillusioned.
I was there when the buildings crumbled to rubble, looking for Bella because I'd at last had word from Angela that she was living in the city. I fucking prayed to God for the first time in my life, begging that she wouldn't be one of those three thousand murdered Americans. I stopped looking for just her though. Every able-bodied man was needed to sift through the tons of steel and concrete which had buried our fellow citizens alive.
Bella became an afterthought to the urgency of attack. Patriotic bones I never knew existed fused together and came to life inside of me.
I joined the Marine Corps October 1, 2001.
I got the Stars and Stripes tattooed in a sleeve down my arm, and the Corps insignia on my pec above my heart. I wasn't a jarhead by birth, but now a soldier baptized in the blood of my countrymen. I am a Devil Dog; a man reborn.
It was surprisingly easy to forget about music. The gray of grunge rock faded as red, white, and blue colored my irises.
It wasn't as easy to forget her. But I made do. Girls like a man in uniform, but they fucking come undone for a Marine. Un. Done.
Still, I searched for her. I kind of wish they had MySpace when she first left. It would've made it a hell of a lot easier to find that girl. When I finally did, though, I sort of wish I hadn't.
Bella was smiling at me from a picture on a computer screen, looking like the Gap girl she'd been before, with a yuppie dude beside her and a kid in her lap. She still took my breath away. And that's a fucking hard thing to do with the great shape I'm in. Looking at her made my hands tremble worse than the first time I picked up my rifle.
But she was gone. She wasn't mine anymore.
"Get down Cullen!" I hear in my radio. But it's too late. I hear my own flesh ripping as I take first a bullet to the shoulder and then another to the neck.
And I'm down for the count.
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A/N: it's Passover tonight, so I'll try to post one more before the crazy weekend. Thank you so much for the lovely reviews, and whoever the guest review was about my Drabble, THANK YOU! I love this writing style.
I'm thinking of competing in the new angst contest. EEEEK! ❤️