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by James Seddon
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My back is turned to my wife and twenty-year-old son as they finish clearing dinner dishes. Our son is attending his college classes remotely while staying with us during the pandemic, a silver lining. In the corner of our kitchen, I pour water into the automatic coffee maker for the next morning. I hate waking up without the coffee ready. The little black coffee robot is one of my best friends. The series Breaking Bad that we’ve been binge watching is paused on our TV until we’re finished cleaning up.
“Did you see the video of Tatis dislocating his shoulder?” my son asks his mother, referring to the Padres’ star shortstop.
As I put one scoop of caffeinated coffee into the basket, an image of a ruined brown dress shirt bursts into my head, uninvited, summoned by the phrase, “dislocating his shoulder.” A slight discomfort in my chest appears, like a gas bubble, but with no physical cause. I freeze with the scoop in my hand.
“No, and I’m not going to,” my wife says emphatically.
“It’s not like you see it pop out,” my son laughs. “He just swings and falls down in pain.”
It’s not a coffee scoop in my hand, it’s my knife. I cut away the Afghan man’s brown dress shirt. It falls, revealing a huge second degree burn across his torso, pink, searing and glistening. It’s the most painful kind of burn. The man struggles and moans with every breath. I suspect that the car bomb’s blast has collapsed one of his lungs. In the kitchen, my heart rate picks up. I involuntarily exhale longer and harder, getting ready for deeper breaths. I feel the coldness of the first drops of adrenaline in my blood. My head gets a bit fuzzy.
“No seriously, check the video out! You don’t actually see it,” my son presses, laughing and enjoying my wife’s joking discomfort at the thought.
The Afghan man’s arm is hanging at a horrible angle, connected to his body in the wrong spot, with bones pushing out against the skin in places where they are not supposed to. A severe dislocation, if not fracture, if not both.
In the kitchen, I know what memory comes next. An Afghan child, one that I had come to know and love, who reminded me so much of my son, lies dead or dying in the street not far from me, snuffed out by the car bomb. I do not go look for him. In the action that day, I don’t even think of him until it is too late to help. My chest constricts, like a boa just starting to increase the pressure, under the guilt I brought home from that day in Kabul. My head begins to fog.
“Nope. No. Ew. Stop it!” my wife says and she laughs with my son as he is pulling out his phone to show her.
Before my treatment, the psychophysiological chain reaction building inside me would achieve criticality and become self-sustaining. Nothing else but that horrible day in Afghanistan would occupy my mind for the rest of the night. I would retreat from my family as soon as I could, leaving a trail of hostility to deter anyone trying to follow me. I would angrily dodge questions about my well-being. I definitely would not want to talk about it. I would not be able to stand even thinking about it. But think about it I would, anyway. Obsessively. All night. Tomorrow would not be a good day at work.
That was before treatment. Tonight, I recognize what is happening and leave Kabul to bring myself back to the kitchen. I am holding a coffee scoop in front of my best robot friend, the coffee maker. As taught, I take a very slow, very deep breath, freeing my chest. My heart slows. I close the lid on the caffeinated coffee jar, scoop some from the decaf jar, and enjoy the smell of the coffee. It’s my favorite kind. To me, coffee smells like “all is well in the world.”
I remind myself. That terrible day in Kabul, and my actions in it, have already been examined and reexamined. So much so that I actually became bored of thinking about it. There is no longer anything to fear in those memories or in the dark corners of my mind. My therapist and I pulled out all the demons that were hiding in the shadows and dragged them into the light. None are left. We made sure of that. I won’t give the memories any more time tonight. They’ve got nothing new to show me. I’ve watched that horror movie so closely so many times that it no longer scares me quite like it used to. These days, post-treatment, I can just switch the movie off. It’s an old one and has lost much of its power over me. I don’t have to worry. The memories will always be there, if I ever need them. They don’t need to be with me right now.
The intrusive memories of the Afghan man, the child, and the car bomb in Kabul, all dissipate like the early morning fog on the coast does with the rising of the sun, leaving me safely in the kitchen with my family.
My son is giving up on teasing his mother and they are now laughing at our new puppy, who is a major dork. I put the last scoop of decaf in the maker and close the lid, proud of how much I’ve cut back on the caffeine lately. I’m glad my wife pushed me to get treatment and that I listened to her. It means that I can stay in the kitchen for so many moments like this. I turn back to my family. Smiling. Calm. Happy.
It is a real bummer about Tatis’s shoulder. He’s likely headed to the injured list and he’s the Padres’ best player. And that dog is definitely a dork.
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James Seddon retired from the Navy after twenty-one years of service with multiple deployments, including to Afghanistan in 2009-2010. When not writing, he works in IT at a university. He lives with his wife, son, and dork-dog in the San Diego area where he’s a regularly unsuccessful fisherman.
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