The Writer With A Gun

In the bright daylight it's a patchwork of staccato impressions: hitting the nose with sulfurous accuracy; accosting the eyes with pinpoints of sight; breaking still molecules with ripping noise:  hard, loud, echoing across a valley of insignificant peace.  It starts as a game with a laminated paper target shredding at impact across the red mud but later it seeps between the bones with deeper implications and darker messages.  Easy to shrug off while knee deep in the woods with your breath hanging on the air in grey chill drifts, while camaraderie trades itself in laughter, bullets, and aim.

Women with firearms is simultaneously a racy fierce powerful experience and a disquieting reversal of everything life affirming.  The people responsible for incubating all the children of the earth lifting 12 gauge shotguns and shooting to kill feels like betrayal.  I didn't mean it to feel that way.  I get it now.  I lifted a 12 gauge shotgun to my own shoulder; military matt black, heavy metal; I stood with my feet steady, my eye narrowed down to the pinpoint view of the mark, with every muscle completely intent on one goal- to hit the target.  The kick of the rifle in my shoulder punctuated by the searing burning echo of the shot.  Not hard to do damage with bird shot scattering pain wide and thin.

My dreams are more dangerous than my waking life.  I sleep with perpetual death: suffocation, drowning, bullets, bombs, fire...every kind of death imaginable...torture, evisceration, I live this in my sleeping hours.  It has become so familiar to walk with cracked bare bloody feet across borderlands between explosions and to stumble into town with a bullet in my back and a long bleed-out before the morning shakes me. 

Shooting guns offers a brief game-like exhilaration followed by a darker reality; people who really have an arsenal in their homes, they're waiting for the world I live every night in my sleep to unfold in front of them in real life.  They see their waking hours as a vast collection of possible violent outcomes for which guns may be their only chance to survive.  I see these same guns as an invitation to the nightmares I've been living my whole life.  I see them as a sign of fear and weakness.

I stood around with a bunch of people who all feel afraid of the world enough to be armed to the hilt and when I look back on my life it is filled with menace and violence and I can't recall one single time when having a gun would have made my situation safer or the outcome better.

Shadows fell across the guns.

It's true that my son has shown me what I was never able to see before- that I am a warrior person just as much as he is.  I feel that ferocity and connect with that part of myself when I'm let loose on a punching bag or when I'm delivering punches to the pads in class and I lose myself in the feel of my knuckles  raw against the leather and I can't tell the difference between leather or skin- it makes no difference.  I have that fight in my blood.  I will not go down easily.  I never have.

Yet I will not compromise my spirit for a taste of greater violence.

Shadows fall across the afternoon like the remembrance of buried toys.  I can only ask the questions I have always asked.  I know it will inevitably lead to my own aloneness, to my deep dismissal, and ultimately to the quiet that invades my heart at all hours of emergence.  It doesn't matter if I pull a steel trigger, invoke the kick of a revolver, or simply murder myself in words.  However it is all meant to pass I will have my part in the play and the words will come to me as they always have, at midnight, and with bite.