by Brig Berthold
The sadness started small. I don’t know when but it always seemed to be there. I remember when sadness felt weak and I turned to anger. When anger proved fruitless, I returned to sorrow. I never learned how to express it. So, I stored it. Collecting it the way I used to collect baseball cards. I remember baseball cards. I remember the sadness being there, too.
I don’t know when the sadness began mixing with shame. Together, they burbled up like rancid bile fermenting in my soul, growing more pungent with time. Compounding, it metastasized like cancer, threatening to overtake each cell in my body. Every day, my coping skills slowly devolved into weary apathy.
I tried to force my pain through muscle, hoping to press pain through pores the way Christians describe Gethsemane. With combat sports, I tried to share my pain with others, swapping traumatic jabs and grieving left hooks. It didn’t work. Neither did alcohol. Neither did marijuana. I’ve learned what is socially acceptable and what is not. I’ve honed my self-destruction into a tight shot group of barely effective trigger releases.
Cutting myself is harm but tattoos are art. Drinking is escapism but binge-reading is personal development. Drugs are illegal but caffeine is necessary.
I wonder how many of us found hope in enlisting. Expecting to suffer but, at least, not alone. Thinking we’d found something honorable, perhaps for the first time. How many, now, see their service through disillusionment and faithlessness? Secretly scratching at scabs to find something pure beneath new shame.
Veterans Affairs lobbies are decorated with suffering soldiers. Tortured. Possessed by demons we can neither make sense of nor exorcise. We’d all made peace with death, in our own ways. We never thought we’d yearn for it.
I used to fantasize about a blaze of glory. A gun battle in some remote part of the world. Or, a poetic betrayal by someone I thought I could trust. I’ve forsaken the flawed nobility of sacrifice. And, if I thought it would help, I’d pray for an end.
These days, I dream of something quiet. An acceptable conclusion to my pain. To leave behind a sense that things ended too quickly. Or, that it was unfair for someone so young. Bravely fought or, maybe, why had they survived and I was taken? They’ll see what they want to see.
The truth is, I’m not going anywhere. Not that I can see or sense. I don’t have what my therapist calls “ideations.” That’s okay. One day, it will come for me and on that day, I’ll lean into life’s last, deeply passionate kiss.
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Brig Berthold is a United States Army veteran and is currently an MFA Student at Converse University in Spartanburg, South Carolina.
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