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Previous Parts: 1. Car 2. House 3. Group Home
4. After everything, he got to go home again. Home to his house, to his family and all of their problems—paying bills, putting food on the table, and keeping the kids out of trouble. He fell back into his old routine, along with everyone else, and everything was just like it was before.
But none of it felt right anymore. He’d had a taste of something else, something more, and his life no longer fit within the same walls. The sound of happy chatter around the table, the echo of children’s cartoons through the living room—it happened around him, but he wasn’t part of it. It made him think of pizza rolls and beer and snorted laughter, of body heat and sly glances from the side. And every time a door opened, or someone spoke to his back, he—
Monica would have understood, he thought. She must have felt that way too, every time she came back. Back to people and places that didn’t match what she’d left behind.
And he tried, he really did. Tried like she must have tried, all those times. To put his own thoughts aside, to be part of the whole again. To be part of what made the house home.
He couldn’t.
So he left.
“Name?” they asked him when he got on the bus, nothing but a bag of old clothes on his shoulder.
“Phillip Gallagher,” he answered, and decided he was.
He wasn’t Ian anymore. Ian was young, and hopeful, and naive. Ian was a child sleeping in the back of a car, a boy sharing a room with his brothers. A man convinced that everything he needed lay in the heart of someone who couldn’t ask him to stay.
Ian never left. He just became someone new.
New worked, for a while. New kept him going, kept him in check. The barracks weren’t home, but he didn’t need one—home hadn’t been enough anyway.
The work was enough. The grueling slog of wake, train, sleep. Following orders without question, like he was used to, like he always had before the day he—
Before the day he didn’t.
It felt good, to be good again. He aced his physicals, scored high on marksmanship. Was too tired to remember why he excelled; too tired to think of obstacle courses on rooftops, or shooting guns under the L, or running from the cops just to keep an eye on someone who had to.
And he didn’t mind the other rules, either. Rules that grated on him not long ago, in a different world. Rules like staying quiet, like staying put. It didn’t matter when they told him he couldn’t leave, because he didn’t have anywhere else to go.
And he was doing well, he was. His bunk was starting to feel like his, worn to the shape of his tired bones. The voices of the other soldiers grew familiar, the cadence of their snores a staple of his nights.
Most nights, at least, when the others weren’t up late whispering. They did that a lot, it seemed. Sharing news from outside, details of lives they left behind. They hadn’t left themselves behind the way he had.
“Got a letter from my little sister,” Joey Burns said one night. “She got into Harvard.”
“My girlfriend left a message with the sergeant,” Conner Williams shared the next. “Her dad ain’t got long left.”
“You hear about the ruckus down in the city?” Jerry Goodman asked in the early hours. “Big drug ring got busted, bet the cops get a big head about it now.”
“Any of you talkin’ for a reason?” Ian cut in sharply. “Because I’m here to train, not to listen to your gossip.”
They grumbled, but they shut up. Stopped talking where he could hear them. Eyed him warily in the mess, during drills, but left him alone.
He’d thought he was good at being alone, by then, but apparently he wasn’t.
Being alone gave him too much time, too much freedom. Too many sleepless nights staring at the ceiling, plain and unmarred, unable to shut up his own mind in the absence of mindless chatter.
He made it a week longer. Almost two. Ignored the overeager recruit that almost bombed his whole squad by accident, and the way his singed eyebrows looked oddly familiar. Ignored the know-it-all private with the curly hair that almost got himself discharged for talking back, and the way he somehow knew that a middle finger was raised discreetly behind the private’s back. Ignored the overly familiar woman at the mess, and the kids there to visit their medal-bedecked dad.
It was fine. He was fine.
Then he stumbled across two boys his age on their way back from the armory, cheeks rosy, uniforms wrinkled.
“Damn,” one of them said with a self-satisfied smirk. “We gotta get extra duties more often.”
“Shit,” the other one hissed, seeing Ian, nothing but fear in his face. “Hey, it’s not what you—”
Ian walked away.
The next day he stole a helicopter, and tried to fly it home.
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Every time I see that G--gle phone photoshop commercial my heart is filled with infinite sadness, like, yeah it's cool you can have a good family photo, it's cool you can do that, but god, there is something to be said for the honesty of a family photo where you're blinking, or crying, or have ugly wrinkles.
What is too unsightly for you? Would you swipe-click-replace out the image of my cousin crying on our Florida trip family reunion photo? Would you remove the plastic snake I have clenched in my grip, which I still have to this day? Would you scoff at the wrinkles around our eyes and the strands of hair on our faces as we squint into the wind, the day before the massive storm? Would I remember it if I didn't have these reminders, if the picture was perfect and clean, all children in a row with perfect gleaming white tombstone tooth smiles? No tears. No plastic snake.
Everyone is beautiful and no one looks genuine.
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