A Bigger Cage

Some memory is gnawing on me today. It is more real than I had given it credit for years.

It was another daily thing that I’d forgotten, sweated through and swatted away with the gnats and the fever of wrongness, slept off inside the walls of my self. It is those walls that I am remembering.

Hotness.

“MP. Why am I in this cage?”

One thousand answers my friend. None of them are hopeful for our species the flimsy dramatic comedies which got us in this position to begin with? Maybe the answer is guns or bombs or opium or a limosine you drove once for a man we wanted dead. Maybe your own cousin ratted you out or maybe everything in the whole world is one giant joke and your life has taken the brunt of it. Maybe our God really does exist and you are being punished for your lack of loyalty. Or maybe your God exists and this is all a test of your faith in him. Maybe we’ve all lost our fucking minds.

But none of these answers seem appropriate and through the anxiety the same excuses come to our dry lips to die there in the sun. With our hands making motions of something bigger something in us makes us all say the same thing.We say it to get on their level. To get out of our uniforms and our positions and our nasty decisions. We say it because we don’t have any more cigarettes to smoke and the whiskey that we brought to work is gone. We say it because we know that we are all subjects of the same void where a God should be.

“But we are trapped as well in a bigger cage.”

They are hollow words, an empty gesture, a stupid thing to say. What asinine self righteousness to spew forth from the mouth of a paid militiaman. There is a glimmer of truth in that we were trapped in a three sided snake of razor wire, bristling with Marines staring out over a lonely harvest of landmines which produce no crop at all save for that crop which sent us to War in the first place. The profitability of murder is undeniable.

Instead of being carried onto the plane which brought us here we walked of our own volition. We sat in seats (which were uncomfortable) while you were chained to the floor. We peed in a hole while you peed in your pants again. When we landed we got into busses, not the back of an armored truck with a barking dog in it. We went to dinner, not the In Processing station with more barking dogs, goggles on your eyes, men screaming and hitting you. We slept on cots with a brown wool blanket (which were uncomfortable) while you slept on a metal slab with a thin sheet exposed to the cold. We slept with the lights off while yours were always on. We jerked off in our own beds while our roommates were gone while you had to tie sheets around your small toilet in the middle of the night only to be interrupted by some guard with a grudge against your personal pleasure which was a Comfort Item at the time. We were sprayed with OC once (and we all hated it) while you get sprayed every day.

The differences in our lives were so many that I could think about them all day without getting bored, hating myself more with every passing revelation of inequality stripped bare before my eyes in the maddened wizard eyes of my 48 charges.

Our cage was forty square miles while theirs was 40 square feet. It was a stupid thing to say.

It is the magic of allowing yourself the luxury of guiltless slumber. We were not oppressing you because we were merely oppressed ourselves. But we all know that is a lie. I can admit that now that I can see this thing that we said to defend our souls.

But do you see, my friend, how I am also trapped inside of a cage much smaller than your 40 square feet? Can you not see the razor wire wrapped around my heart which causes me this endless pain, which I will carry long after you are released, which constricts with every new defensive lie. Can you not see that to this cage of mine there are no keys and no guards and no wardens and no OC spray. There is only me and my razor wire heart.

Is this just another excuse? To cause myself such pain in commiseration with your unjust affair? The game with these words is so deep, each new depth a new lie which constricts more. Another flimsy defense? Maybe.

There are so many maybes in a place like that. Maybe, my friend, you are a terrorist. Maybe you built bombs which sliced open not only the lives of Americans (a population whom any God would damn) but your own people and all of these misdeeds done right in front of your God. Is there blood on your hands and would you tell me honestly if I asked you? Or are you also a victim of a very small cage inside of yourself. If that is the case, then despite these stupid uniforms that we wear, we are brothers.

The razor wire may ruin our lives, but we’ll go ruined into the depths of Hell together, my friend.