Understanding (is overrated...)

People don’t understand how it happened. How it happens. But then again this isn’t the first time in my life I’ve been somewhere and no one seems to understand how.

Understanding is overrated.

I don’t NEED to be understood. Ever.

Understanding is a luxury item with no real use or importance.

I need food. I need a place to live. I need money. And yes sometimes I really NEED a fix. Understanding? Sympathy? Empathy? Love?

Love…

Guess I can do without those because you can’t spend them. You can’t eat them. They don’t keep you warm at night when you can see your own breath and you squat in some corner to take a piss and you can’t believe anything steaming could possibly be coming out of your own body a for a moment that part of you that the piss is flowing through feels warm – warm enough that you don’t even mind that you ass is hanging out completely exposed because it went numb a long time ago. You’re just not sure if it was from the cold or from sitting on the pavement…

But I digress.

She tells me when I digress. She likes fancy words like Digress.

They roll off her tongue like foreign poetry – silky and hypnotic. Her eyes blaze and she smiles ever so slightly. Everything she does is elegant. She says it’s about understanding time and timing and being sure of one’s self. She says she was once like me.

But I don’t think she ever could have been like me. She’s classy. I’m just crap. But now I belong to her. And people say I’m crazy.

“Isn’t it dangerous?” they whisper. “What if she – you know…” they’re too chicken-shit to finish the sentence out loud.

“Kills me?”

It makes me laugh actually. After jumping out of air transports and fighting in The Trenches on three different continents in The Last War, people really have the nerve to ask that question.

Of course they don’t know that when they first meet me.

I look different now. My hair is longer. I wear clothes that cover up most of the Duty Tats and scars. People could almost mistake me for a regular woman. But beneath the nearly feminine veneer she has fashioned for me I’m nothing more than an empty shell.

“There is a way to fill the emptiness,” she sometimes croons.

“Not your way.”

“No,” she chides. “Not my way.” And she licks her blood-stained lips.

She’s smarter than her peers. Smarter than I’ve ever been. She was one of the first sent to the The Trenches. And the mark she wears is far more difficult to bear – so she keeps it carefully hidden.

There are so few of her kind left that they are no longer hunted. The council has far bigger mistakes to cover for. And maybe there’s a masochistic part that appreciates her continued existence. A small portion to the Council Collective that allows her presence as reminder to themselves of how far they have come.

Who would think that the organization once in charge of all things War and death related would turn all its efforts to something that should be as instinctual as breeding.

No worries here. My weapons, the burning reactors, the dust clouds in Chinazikstan – all left me sterile.

History tells of a time before my time – before her time even – when men fought their own wars. They started them and they finished them.

But not The Last War. It was a war that the men could not finish – and so women were sent when there were no more men. There were more of us anyway, they argued.
But all this is ancient history. Not the world I was born to. The world she is trying to save me from.

Soon this will all make sense. There is much to tell and more to explain. I do not care if you understand. That is not my concern. I am only concerned that you know. For someday my heart will cease to beat – either at her hand or the passage of time. And someday she too may be hunted or just meet a blazing demise. But our story is important. Her story is important. That may even be why she chose me.

But now I tire. Tomorrow is a new day for telling. And now I will dream of faces erased long ago by poor planning, miscommunication and the arrogance of men.