Two weekends ago... (don't start that why are you talking about it this week, because I'm only now composed enough to talk about it)...
...two weekends ago, I revisted a song...
...t'was the melodious sounds of multiple shots fired randomly at a dense crowd.
I was inside, but that doesn't really matter. Bullets have been known to go through walls with enough provocation. In fact, they have. Many a moon ago one nearly shortened my brother's life. (Had he been over to his right by six inches, I wouldn't have him around to bug me today. Compute that, six inches saved his life...) So walls mean nothing.
My sister was outside at the time. She hurried inside (proof that overweight people can run with proper incentive).
She had a friend with her who said all 21 young years passed in front of her eyes.
Oddly enough, mine didn't.
I was mere yards away. Some plaster separated me from Death. Very. Weak. Plaster.
I didn't flinch. I wasn't scared. I didn't get flashes of my life and mournful regrets.
Not saying I was happy, nor would I have been about dying. Truth, it probably would have sucked big time for those I'd leave behind...
..but no fear and no sadness.
I can't say if I'd go to heaven or hell, or even if I'm accepted the fact that such places exist (it's debatable).
I can't say my death would have meant much.
I can't really say anything...
...save the sounds were somewhat haunting...
...
And looking back, I heard the cries and tears of others that can only have been heard by someone who knows the sound intimately. Someone who lives within a community that has been built around the symbolism these noises represent.
Forget the war on terrorism, forget being shellshock, forget war victims...
I can show you all of that right here.
...I want to show you that violent symphony being argued and debated about as it occurs in far off lands is really only a few miles away.
...there was a victim. I last heard he (he? Believe it was a he... a nameless person...) is in ICU.
But with the shots I heard the echoes.
...I heard the tears of babes as they would never know their father being struck by that sound.
I heard the cries of mothers/wives/sisters weeping over graves of lives much to young now gone.
I heard the sirens breaking the illusion of peace during the night to send off another victim.
Perhaps... perhaps I heard in that sound, the sound of my own stepfather as his life was cut short when his face was blown off.
Perhaps.
I know I heard the sound of lives irrevocably changed from both ends of the barrel.
I stopped crying a long time ago. Tears... they don't change the sounds that echo.
I admit to being insane. I'm one of the few. I can see the lines of insanity, and where I crossed them. I crossed them two weeks ago as I listened to the shots fired.
...I just smiled and thought they had a nice pitch.
