Page 17 of Carry Me Home
“You look different,” she observed. “I almost didn’t recognize you.”
Probably because I hadn’t gotten a haircut since I was discharged months ago. It was shaggier than the short military cut I’d been sporting since high school.
I grunted, not slowing my pace. She had to hustle to match her shorter legs to my much longer stride.
“Can you believe that guy?” she huffed. “He stole my spot. My signal was on and everything!”
Irritation made my muscles feel too tight for my skin. “There’s plenty of parking,” I pointed out.
She sniffed. “It’s the principle at stake. I was there first and my signal was on.”
“So?”
“So?” she echoed. “What do you mean,so?”
I scrubbed my hands down my unshaven jaw. I didn’t have the patience for this. Transitioning to civilian life from the military was a rough adjustment for almost everyone, but especially for those who had served in the special forces. Life on the outside was different. Less structure, lower stakes. I had expected that.
But damn.
I hadn’t expected it to be so fuckingstupid.
“You can’t let people get away with stuff like that, right?” she pressed.
It was the last straw. We were at the glass doors and if Sarah followed me around the grocery store, nagging at me, I would lose my shit. I needed to end this before someone called my mom.
“I don’t fucking care, Sarah,” I said impatiently. Her eyes widened. “You both found parking spots, and then you kept arguing about something that doesn’t fucking matter. You wasted each other’s time. You wasted your own time. And now you’re wastingmytime. Look at my face, Sarah. Do I look happy about you wasting my time?”
Her gaze darted around my face, and she licked her lips nervously. “N-no.”
“So stop.” I snagged a cart and pushed through the sliding glass doors, ignoring the whispers behind me. It was the same shit everyone had been saying behind my back since I came home for good.
He’s not the same guy anymore. The military changed him.
He’s dangerous.
He has PTSD.
He needs therapy.
I snorted and headed for the dairy aisle. They were wrong—on all of it. I was the same guy now as I was back then. The military didn’t change me; it gave me an outlet. I wasn’t dangerous, although I could see a day in the not-so-distant future when I might become so, if people didn’t stop walking so damn slowly all the time. I had bad dreams sometimes, but I didn’t have PTSD, and I saw a therapist once a month, thank you very fucking much.
I just couldn’t make myself care. About any of it. It was like a gauze curtain hung down over everything. I could see the mountains and land and people I loved through the haze, but nothing felt real. Home was right there in front of me, but I couldn’t touch it, no matter how hard I tried.
For the first time in my life, I was lost.
Mountains hada way of putting things in perspective. The Rocky Mountains that lined the horizon to the west of Aspen Springs had witnessed the end of dinosaurs and the rise of humans. Births and deaths, all the wars and shifting borders—the mountains had seen it all and did not give a fuck about any of it. Everything was small from the perspective of a mountain.
That was how I felt. Like a goddamn mountain. I had zoomed out so far I couldn’t figure out how to zoom back in again.
I wanted to. God, I wanted to. I would give my entire bank account to fucking give a damn aboutsomething. Anything.
After putting away the groceries, I took off for a hike. It was April and there was still snow in the mountains, so I stayed at lower elevation and followed the river. Two miles in, where the river crooked, I sprawled out, leaning my back against a large boulder. It only took a moment for the cold granite to penetrate my coat. It should have been uncomfortable, but instead it was a relief. At least I feltsomething. I tipped my head back against the rock and closed my eyes.
I stayed like that, the babble of the river and the breeze in the aspens luring me closer to sleep, until the soft fall of footsteps jolted me from the brink. I cracked one eye opened and saw a haze of red.
“Are you dead?” a child’s voice demanded.
I opened both eyes. A little girl, maybe six or seven, I wasn’t a good judge of these things, stared back at me with mismatched eyes that made me squint a little to make sure I wasn’t seeing things. Nope, they were definitely two different colors. Her right eye was hazel and her left eye was blue.
