"KILLED Via Survivor’s Guilt"
-By FELONIOUS ACADEMIC
The bullet that seemed to miss me did not miss.
It entered through the soft meat behind his left ear and exited carrying most of what he used to think, And most of his past time memories.
standing no further then me from the muzzle-flash.
The exit wound painted a Rorschach on the drywall Made up Of brain matter and blood splatterings,The silhouette resemblanced nothing but death.
I smelled it before I saw it, hot metallic copper, scorched hair, the sudden bowel loosening perfume of a body deciding, in one god forsaken instant, stop being polite about dying its the foremost disrespectful experience one has in their lives.
They say the mind protects itself by blurring trauma into soft focus. How typical for Mine to bypass such a memo.
Every frame is 8K, I can still hear the distinctive pop his head made when the kinetic energy stole the atlas from his axis, the way his skull unhinged like a broken door and stayed open,
I kept the shirt I wore that dooming day folded in the bottom drawer like a war relic or military fatigue from the war.
It still smells faintly of cordite and the fuckin sweet rot that begins when circulation quits. I open the drawer sometimes pissy late at night. Reliving every morbid detail from your execution.
Nauseated from life, gagging on the ghost of him. Truth be told, It’s the closest I come to prayer.
The newspapers called it “miraculous.”
Miraculous is the word civilians use when they want to pretend survival has fuckin dignity.
Bullshit!
There is no dignity.
Theres only vector calculus,one body occupied that fatal coordinate, the other did not.
I did not.
I was the control variable, The remorseful survivor obessively questioning his existence.
I piss blood sometimes now, not from injury, from lifes sheer hydraulic pressure of guilt, its trying to force its way out through whatever orifice allows it to.
As if My kidneys were trying to fuckin filter him out of me. Only To no veil.
He’s already dissolved, embedded in my motherfuckin marrow, A radioactive isotope of remorse with a half-life longer than mine.
At the cemetery the headstone reads BELOVED SON BROTHER FRIEND and I wanted to claw the granite free of his name until my nails bled and broke in pieces
I ask, who let the bullet choose correctly that day?
I stood one goddamn stride outside the kill zone.
Standing at Arms reach,
I was somewhere between your fate and mine
Yet, still i live today
despite something dying inside me that infamous day.
I talk to the vacancy imagining were in Conversation as we once did before your death
I even tell the void how so very sorry in every tense past present future conditional I am.
The vacancy never answers my pleas, I just sit there being more honest with myself than I ever exaggerated.
the lungs still inflate.
The heart still contracts and relaxes like it has universal permission to.
the tongue remembers how to still exaggerate a deflecting “I’m fine” wheno asked.
your death, that day stole whats left of lifes oxygen to breath,
It's hope for tomorrow, its small joys, where at this point it's all numb to the touch.
I am the remainder. The decimal that won’t terminate. The leftover fraction nobody wants to carry.
Yet I carry on
Oh i carry on
Every sunrise is an audit. Every breath an embezzlement. Every heartbeat perfectly metronomed Under lifes contract thats written in someone else’s blood.
I keep walking. One foot in front of the other through the long musky corridor hallsof what’s left.
Carrying his unfinished sentence in my mouth like shrapnel that never quite works its way out.
Brother, You became the dead too soon, and I the man who lived.
And that is the cruelest verb I know.
-Dispatched from the meat locker of the still living FELONIOUS ACADEMIC
