This is strictly an aside.

Maybe I don’t refer to myself as a soldier as much as I should. I was, certainly, but I didn’t necessarily think of myself as one. I fit the definition to a T, as a person who executed orders to execute, but despite that, I had a hard time making the image line up. The picture of a shell-shocked man in camouflage staring empty-eyed at the camera should resonate with me more than it does. More than anyone else I know, I’m empty-eyed. More than anyone else I know, I’m shell-shocked.

But I try to put myself in that man’s shoes and I can’t make them fit.

I suppose knowing that that’s the case lessens the effect. Do the truly shell-shocked know what they’re missing? Even now that I’m older, I still look back on these days with a certain fogged-over fondness. I don’t remember the pain as much as I should. I don’t recall the anxiety, the pressure, the walls closing in and the smell of half-sloshed brains and such. That was so omnipresent in everything I did that it simply stopped registering after a while.

Memories form differently for me now. More vividly than anything else, I remember the words and the shapes. Early on, there’s a lot of strange ones—things that cemented themselves in my brain while it was still rewiring. I vividly remember the exact make and model of coffee maker we had in the old barracks. I could correctly identify the motel room I stayed in with Ava before she choked out that man with mold if I was placed in sample of a hundred different motels. The bed-frame was misaligned, my bed-frame, and it sloped ever so gently to the back-left corner.

What was it that she told me after the deed was done? “It’s war, Erika, forget it.”

The point here is that the things I recall don’t necessarily align with what other people do. When I think back on the day Yoru died, I can feel that sticky ninety-one degree heat draped over me like a duvet but I can’t remember a thing about what either of us were wearing. I could recite our entire conversation in the car back to any passing listener, but I couldn’t tell you what kind of car we had that talk in.

When you lose an angle, you get stronger in the other ones. The old adage about the blind having heightened senses in other areas isn’t strictly true, but I do remember certain things more strongly than I used to—and my brain links strange things together to account for a lack of stimulation.

It’s enough to make me wonder—does my key get stronger as I lose more of myself? Nothing I’ve seen or read points to that, but it certainly seems that way. It’s a correlation versus causation thing, I guess—that’s what Bell would say, probably—but I can’t help but conflate the two. Maybe if I completely abandoned any sense of conscious thought or feeling, I could reverse the land and ocean.

If I did fit that image of that lost soldier, how much stronger would I be?

By now, I think the end of this story is fairly clear. I, obviously, survive. I won’t begin to distribute luck across us by saying those who died are luckier than me or vice-versa. That’s not really a fair assessment.

It was what it was. We did what we could to survive. We did what we had to to get by. I never wished for death. That was never an option for me. I didn’t even consider it—not consciously, anyway. I won’t hold myself responsible for anything I tried to do that first day I went blind. That wasn’t me. Those weren’t my actions.

So, maybe—the picture did fit, for just one day back in October.

Why didn’t the picture fit? What did I have to do to slot myself in there? Let my color seep out, slip into something less comfortable, dig myself a trench and die in it? I’d done all those things already, barring maybe the last, and even then I felt like that was up for debate.

I couldn’t help but measure myself against the data: the things I’d seen in my place in books and movies and such. My father never bothered to monitor what media I was taking in, so I had a habit of just watching whatever was in front of my eyes when I had sleepless nights back in Red Creek. Late night war movies, horror films—things ten-year-olds shouldn’t be watching.

I remember not being particularly moved by any of them. Was it because I’d fantasized about just as much, staring out the window on the bus on the way home from school? God only knew what I’d wished on some of the people I knew. What difference did it make watching it on a screen outside of my head instead of the one inside?

I’d already cried my last. It took more than just death to move me now.

Did that make me a soldier, then? Was all it took a neutral attitude toward the side-effects of war? It might have, but it didn’t make me fit the picture. I was stronger than that, I guess, depending on who you ask.

I’d seen what he’d seen without batting an eye.

Back in the simpler days at the Radiant, we took a group photo—one of the only pieces of evidence we had that all six of us in Unit 6 existed. One day when we were all around, Benji came upstairs to our room and announced that he wanted to get a picture of all of us together. It surprised the group, but not me—I’d been on the receiving end of this kind of sudden bout of attention before, so I knew what to expect from it. I knew this wasn’t indicative of a trend.

And so we all went out into town, and we found some alley somewhere, leaned ourselves up against the brick sidewall of an Italian restaurant just off the main street, and Benji set up the tripod. I remember looking at the photo after Benji got it printed out and thinking we looked like some kind of weird missionary group. Despite my fairly well-documented opinions on that kind of treatment, I’d be lying if I said I didn’t have a bit of fun. Group experiences with no stakes were so rare among Unit 6 that the novelty of it alone was enough to carry the moment, even if it was only for an hour—even if it was only once.

I’m not sure where that picture is now. I think Benji framed it for his office, but I’m not entirely sure why he’d do that given that the picture featured both me and Bell prominently. If it was intended to be a reminder, I can’t imagine exactly what it was supposed to remind him of. It had to be something positive, or else he wouldn’t have done it—but the existence of it flew in the face of everything he’d ever said to me.

By all accounts, I was meant to be forgotten.

I’m mentioning this because, to the best of my knowledge, it’s the only photo of me after I left the care of my father. I was completely undocumented outside of receipts, security camera footage lost to time, and that picture.

And in that picture, I was happy. To the untrained eye, nobody would know anything else was going on.

I didn’t look like a soldier then, did I? I didn’t have the scars, I didn’t have the thousand-yard stare. No camouflage, no helmet, no gun. Just a girl in jean shorts and a t-shirt out with her church group.

Bell aside, of course.

I know I don’t match the image of the shell-shocked soldier, but it doesn’t change the way I feel. I want to fit into a mold that’s not shaped like me.

I’ve somehow managed to trick myself into thinking life would be easier that way.

I suppose God only answers the convenient prayers.