Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9, Part 10, Part 11, Part 12, Part 13
I didn’t care about the people around me. Didn’t notice the small details that defined them as individual. I didn’t smile at the children or attempt dialogue with the adults. I was about to arrive at a familiar paradise, the soft skin of my girlfriend, gently fragrant in comparison to the pungency in which I’d been steeped. Add that to the wet, stinky lapping of my dog's tongue across my laughing face, the juice of a fat cheeseburger exploding with each bite, and the gentle breeze casually afforded by air-conditioning, and mantras were easy to come by.
It was going to be the perfect day.
Ladies and gentlemen, I present:
The air was different by the time I arrived to the Atlanta International Airport, cleaner, more crisp somehow, filled with tiny particles of good news where good news had been scarce. I felt it find a comfortable purchase in my blood, fortifying my momentum toward the world I’d left behind.
Standing in line at the customs counter, I imagined what incredible things were going to happen in the next few hours. My girlfriend would greet me in a stretch limo, wearing nothing but a socks, offering up a small treasure box filled with secret things that tilt the world and force a smile.
And I’d turn it down to focus on what was important, appreciating each following moment for all its heavenly glory.
By the time the limo got to the house, my dog would have figured out a way to unlock the front door, only to get to his master more quickly. I’d love on him, order a burger from a local restaurant, and hop on my laptop to write the next Great American Novel in between acts of legendary carnality, all while safe and secure in the nest of a familiar culture and as important, my couch.
After roughly thirty minutes of waiting in line, I approached the young customs agent, smiling and happy to see him. He looked at me like my face was a monitor showing him continuous loops of how his puppy had died a couple of days before.
“Do you have anything to declare?”
“Yeah, Nicaragua is freakin' wild.”
He looked at me with a piercing glare, like he’d been through a combat the day before.
“WHY?!”
He hadn’t been in combat the day before, so I kept smiling at the guy, knowing that laughing out loud at him might get a finger put inside me, then continued through to the baggage claim.
I was mildly surprised when I saw that all of my gear was still inside the bag.
The water purification device, the multi-tool, my medicine…
I would have imagined that something would have been stolen. But no, turns out the Nicaraguan customs did a great job. Pleasantly surprised, I brought my bag to the check-in for my flight back to Columbia.
South Carolina isn’t the hub of much, but it’s my home and it called to me.
Three hours later I’d texted my girlfriend to tell her I’d landed when I grabbed my book bag at the baggage claim, water-purification device gone, multi-tool stolen, the only good news being my pills were still there.
It probably helped that none of them were really abusable.
But still, the invasive nature of thievery leaves a rot in you, a festering, memetic wound that, if not looked after, can define your perspective. Luckily, I’d dealt with it before and didn’t let it get to me too much.
So I cursed the Atlanta TSA for being as corrupt as anyone with power, then walked out to the curb to wait for my girlfriend. We lived ten minutes away.
Any second now...
Fifteen minutes later and I texted her again.
Thirty minutes later and I texted her again, patient so that the moment she arrived wouldn’t blow up in my face. I tend to attract very… dynamic company. The sort that doesn't often last long, but leaves its mark.
Twenty minutes after that and my car pulls up, my girlfriend shocked at the state I was in. Hair tousled, eyes wide with mania, a dark tan where my pale skin had been. She hugged me, then ushered me to the driver’s seat of her car, reading that I was starving for just a bit of control.
I took a breath.
And another.
Then put the car into gear, tires spinning as I sped toward the future and the common comforts of my home.
I missed my dog more than blue misses orange. Since I’d left the Marine Corps, he was the first thing I could truly love unfettered.
I was expecting him to knock me over when I got home.
But while I was gone, my girlfriend had asserted her dominance and my dog had entirely forgotten who I was. Without so much as a lick of my hand, he ran up to her, tail wagging, head bowed.
After a while, I sat on my bed and he approached, tentative but excited. It didn’t take him long to remember.
Just long enough for my heart to break a little.
Of course, he had no idea what I’d been through.
Still doesn’t, as far as I can tell.
Anyway, after ensuring my dog knew how much I loved him, I hopped onto my laptop that I hadn’t seen in three weeks to send the TSA a claim letter. Not because I expected anything back, but because they should keep a tally of the thieves in their department.
I got halfway through the letter before I realized the battery wasn’t charging. My laptop was broken and dying. Keep in mind, as a writer, that’s bad news in the absolute.
More than a little disconcerted, I jumped into my own car that had been sitting in my driveway for three weeks. It wouldn’t turn over. The battery was fine, but something else wasn’t. I tried to pop it into neutral, but one of the tires had gone flat from a slow leak, so the car wasn’t going anywhere.
All I’d wanted was a reprieve, an oasis of calm in the torrent of the last few weeks. Frustration began rising in me like thick fog after a heavy rain, blocking out the landscape of good in which I had arrived.
But in this tumult, in this unforgiving string of unfortunate events, I was given pause and a solid glimpse of serenity, a sunbeam at first piercing the fog, then dissipating it entirely.
I’d made it back, through paradise and panic, grime and glory, beauty and brutality to look at my home through new eyes. These weren’t frustrations I was living. These were tiny moments of tedium in a world filled with the dichotomy of interwoven, independent microcosms.
And I was comfortable with my place in all of it.
That night, covered in blankets and weighed down by my girlfriend and dog, I felt a powerful peace that had been hard fought, if not deserved. I contemplated how lucky I was, filled to bursting with humble gratitude toward the world that had allowed it.
I looked at my folded black knife, the one with the serrated smile that was born from molten anger and cooled to solid form by a cold, brutal singularity of purpose. It whispered to me fantasies of justified violence and pain with a voice both silken and interminable.
And I gave that hellish thing away as soon as I had the chance.
THE END