Mjr. Mikha · @hardasswoman
4th Sep 2018 from TwitLonger
Army
Flecks of graphite exploded in every direction like shrapnel from a hand grenade, dotting the piece of white notebook paper until it resembled the aftermath of a volcano.
Ashes everywhere, death...destruction…
On a quick flick of her eyes, she counted at least three pairs staring back at her with a question in them…
Is she okay?
Should I say something to her?
What the fuck is wrong with her?
Maybe if she tried to make some kind of imaginary shape in the mess her pencil had made, it would distract her from feeling like a zoo animal. It was easy enough to do with clouds…
...but the only thing she could come up with was television static...the T.V. in the corner had been broken for three weeks. The power button was caved in, and someone had kicked the socket into the wall so you couldn’t reach the plug.
Snatching the notebook off the table, she shook it off onto the cement ground, slapped it against the wooden bench a few times...then dropped it back in front of her.
And stared.
It was a mildly humid day...mildly humid in Texas meant hot enough to burn Satan’s testicles...and she hadn’t seen rain since the fucking dinosaurs. Her hair was sticking to her forehead in stringy bits, and the corners of her mouth were chapped.
Write, you idiot.
She laughed. That worked about as good as a coward mentally screaming at himself to shoot.
It didn’t help that the fucking topic...the prompt of the day was ‘write about a time when you felt like you were overwhelmed’...
...It was fucking impossible to fit her entire life onto this 8x12 piece of graphite-smeared paper.
Not that any of the other topics were any better…’write about a time where you felt challenged’...’write about a bad memory’...’write about a person that you didn’t see eye to eye with’...’write about a crowning achievement’...
…’Write about when you told this notebook to fuck off’...that was more like it.
The remnants of the word she’d broken her pencil on were still there on the first line…
“In 2004…”
Pushing out an aggravated breath, she erased until the paper was torn.
Then wrote “In 2004” again right below it because she just didn’t fucking care at that point.
“In 2004, I almost died. Wouldn’t that make anyone feel fucking overwhelmed you assholes?”
She bolded the word ‘assholes’ about five times to make sure it stood out.
‘Throw me in isolation...I don’t care.’
Maybe she could sit here until the sun went down and just sleep under the table...it’s not like anyone would notice.
“Mikha, do you have anything to share?”
Her head jerked up to find the eyes of Dr. Schwartz staring back at her from across the circle...the circle of the other army vets that she was sitting in...that wasn’t outside in a park...the circle that was inside of the fucking gym that it was always in…
The shitty chair under her ass reminded her again that she was not seated on a picnic bench...fuck.
“No, not really.”
“Maybe you’d like to read what you’ve written in your journal?”
“...No.”
“This is a safe environment, Mikha-”
“No, Dr. Schwartz, this isn’t. A safe environment would be sitting in a nice home watching T.V. without replaying the images of my troops dying in front of me, or listening to the ringing sounds of explosions, or hearing the screams of-”
She stopped, the rest of the words getting choked in her throat…
“...I’m not reading from my fucking journal.”
Dr. Schwartz sighed, but accepted it. “Moving on, then…”
‘Write about a time when you felt overwhelmed.’
There was only one word that she could write down. Only one word that could explain all of it.
‘Army.’