I think that at the heart of all sentimentality is a fear of insensitivity, that lingering fear that we might not be feeling things like we should. Maybe our feelings are broken?
There were times in my life when I knew I should be feeling something, something more than what I felt, which felt like nothing at the time, and I was scared, but those were hard times for everyone I could see.
The world was such a hard place then.
Sentimentality only made those awful days longer. So I shut it off. I zoned out. And now I fear that maybe I cannot feel. Maybe I am a sociopath. I can’t turn it on, I can’t zone in.
So I reconstruct the ingrained sentiment that got burned into every fiber of that suit that I wore which was there every day, impartially soaking up the morbid sun and all of those prayers which wavered out to sea, addressed to a God who still has yet to come. The green suit. The orange suit. We were at war.
The fiber was as much a slave as I was. It was only there because I had gotten us into this mess with my hasty contract signing. The fiber was the most virtuous in our twisted war story.
To liberate the rag and that sentiment, those feelings which ought to have been felt, which are there by way of infusion, that is my goal. I will accomplish it with scissors and water and my hands.
Destroy it, and as it turns to pieces, smell the sun and the cigarettes and the racist jokes and the homophobia and the cordite and the prayer oil and the oc spray and all those hot nights alone staring out over what can happen here because we are insane and thinking blankly that surely this is all absurd.
Reconstruct the sentimental fibers into paper, in the shape of my story, as a vessel for it’s own story.
The stories, the paper, floats out over the ocean like a prayer or a styrafoam cup or a passengerless airplane, a mute gesture made in vain towards a cruelly fair universe in which we’ve created our own hell. The gesture reads: “I can see that you’ve given me these lemons… well…”
It is a story that only me and my uniform know, and the uniform is the only one of us that isn’t a liar.
SPC Mixon
The Paper Trail 