Left standing alone, the wind grasps my hair sending it running full force backwards. I’m posted at the valet station in front of Queen Marie; that grungy hotel that bleeds cigarette smoke from every opening. I was not waiting for a car, but in need of escaping that tempting leaky faucet and deep depth of the tub. I can tell you, you never really do understand the reason why there are locks on hotel windows until you are knees deep in a series of things you never could fix. The October wind tonight seems to be finding enjoyment in playing with my jacket. I pull it closed, the winds company was uninvited. Extending into my pocket, a jerked movement pulled at my arm before I could station my hands. “No. Way.” that voice, the way the fingers molded to my arm. I yanked myself away alarmed with how familiar it all felt after so long.

Signaling a series of flashbulb memories, my synapses were going AWOL fueling a fight in which memory to antagonize me with first. I didn't even want to look at him, but all the time that surged past us held me in a paralytic gaze. Life was cruel to him. His face did a good job painting such for me. Orange, unnaturally smooth, drooped and pulled, his face outward revealing an illusion of shock and with perpetual surprise. My eyes then moved to his eye. All together the kid looked like he was quickly dipped in acid. Things falling off. Skin in patches. A grotesque mess. The girl he sent off in a taxi looks so young I mistake her for his daughter, but then I remembered that he never had kids. He always talked about how if he got some girl pregnant he’d club her stomach with a bat right then and there.

I smirk at the memory. Throwing a polite nod in his direction, I shift my shoulders back towards the entrance of the hotel, he follows. “You know, last time I saw you we were stationed in Fort Rucker Alabama.” Blinking away my thoughts I try to tap into memories that had been caught in a constant suppression. He continued and I looked down at the ground. “Tigh, did you lose your voice during all this time apart?”

“No.” my voice abruptly fell out with a tone too large for my own good.

“There he is” his smile stretched outward. I open the door to the hotel. Again he follows. “ I don’t think we have ever seen each other’s hair grown out like this? It had always been that butch cut.” I keep walking looking for the elevator. I swear to god if he was going to follow me up into my room, I promise you the dam of my composure will split open. His presence was something I purposely meant to leave in Alabama. I stop and wait for the elevator. He stands next to me.

“Excuse me if I step out of my manners, but can I help you?” he was taken aback a bit rubbing his right eye in confusion.
  
“Somethin’ happen after they sent you out to South Korea?” the elevator doors open. I let them close.

 “Just leave me alone.”

“You haven’t contacted any of us. Not me, not Wales, not Tommy. It has been twenty-five years and you have the audacity to tell me to leave you alone? Well ‘excuse me if I step out of my manners’ but to hell with leaving you alone. Where did you go?” People around the elevator had turned to look in our direction in response to his tone.

Exhaling, I clicked the elevator button once more. The doors immediately respond. “Follow me.”

Booting open the cherry wood door I switched on the light. An illumination spotlighted the unmade bed piled high with notebooks, pencils, pens, a ruler, and a compass. I sit and cling myself to the foot of the bed like pews in a cathedral; the mattress sinks very easily when I do so. My observations of the hotel room posed as a subtle distraction from his presence. Vinyl curtains stained with years of nicotine hung loosely from the ill-fastened rods on the edges of the window. Shagged in its day, the rug bled a faint red. Freely it stretched across the floor with confidence as if it has been guarding secrets underneath; years of dirt and sin. A savonarola chair met with a chess table. They both have left indented spaces of tiny squares matted at various locations across the floor. “So what they said about your eye was true.” I tried to keep the suppression going but the ambiguity in the air made it difficult to do so. Smudges in the mirror swallow him immediately as he squints, really studying his crusted slit as if it was the first time he’d seen it. I wouldn’t have been surprised if it was. The reality of his life- or at least back at the camp was how he’d move through things with this positivity that seemed to cancel out any stimuli he’d assume would drop his mood.

“Yup. Damn shrapnel from an OED was centimeters away from spiking my frontal lobe. I swear I saw death with my own eyes.” his face was not animated anymore as he cleared his throat.

“Must have gotten deployed to Iraq then?”

“Central Africa. You have not seen a nation plunged into chaos like that, man. Hell, it was one of our first days there. We were on our way to investigate an area where there was this “spike in civilian casualties” so Lieutenant Faulkner put it. Snuck through lengthy trees to do so. Those remote rural areas were too damn risky to access head on. As the mass of our helmets lurched forward, bodies upon bodies were internally displaced within the forest. They had created a habitat within the foliage living in what felt like immense fear of the political turmoil that had been raging. They were so still as we moved past their homes.” I didn’t say anything back so he continued. “How’d you end up here anyway? You always used to ramble on about getting out of the army system you’d called a s***hole. You always used to say bigger and better things were out there in this world for you and you were going to explore every last bit. Are you just visiting Wyoming?”

“No, I have been living in Van Tassell for a couple years now.”
  
“Living for a couple years now, eh? You must've’ met a girl down here to be living in a town as ghostly as this. Who is the chick, did she kick you out?”

  “No romance for me. I had ripped Corinthians 13 out of the bible years ago.”
  
 “Well then why are you here?”
  
“I’m here in Wyoming because my Ma’ was up here. I came to keep her company and ended up taking over her husband's store after he passed. I owed it to her.”
  
“Huh. The way you always talked about traveling. I expected more.” These words sent my thoughts full force.

“You know, one moment you think that life where you stand is permanent. Despite what a naive thought this is you still have it yelling off the tallest peak in your mind telling you to get comfortable to this scenery because this s*** is never going to change. This is what fuels you to pray off an ideology of lusting after this planet. As the permanent walls seem to cage around you, a little cog grinds in the back of your mind turning the reality of ‘this is all temporary’ but you don’t believe. And the next moment you find parts of your body spread across this globe. I mean it too. You must have remembered that night we snuck out of camp with Wales and Tommy. Hell if I could go back… but anyways that night we snuck out I threw up all over you guys ideas of me picking up madonnas along the Tyrrhenian shorelines. I’d say how all I’d needed to do was brag about my acoustic skills and they would be swarming and you guys always busted my balls about the fact that only knowing two chords would do no justice for me. I threw up the idea of how I would have ditched where I was at anytime to drink my skin to sleep with the northern lights dilating my pupils in Norway. You both were probably obliterated by that point in the night, but man I did it. I swear. My feet danced across Machu Picchu, fingers laid upon Chichén Itzá. I left parts of me everywhere. Remember that plastic kazoo you wouldn’t stop playing all night long in the tent when all the other men just wanted you to stop? How you would play it and I’d tell all the men what you're playing could put the gods to sleep in ancient Greece.”

“Hell yeah I remember that kazoo, it was so damn sacred to me”

“Remember how you lost it? Well I took it... the scoundrel that I am- I didn’t say a word because I wanted a part of you since I was going. That f***ing kazoo, I left it in Poland on the dresser of some woman. See what I mean? You leave parts of yourself everywhere in this world, but for some reason where you stand now feels so permanent, like you will experience a change. All that and yet here I am spending my days sweeping dust in a deli filled with empty racks and skeletons with maps of the world tucked neatly in their thoracic cages shoved in the storage closet in Wyoming. I didn’t mean to end up here honestly- my Ma’... guilt was harboring within me circling around how I was never there for her. I had this theory that maybe if I stayed instead of leaving her with a fragment of myself she’d be healed. Bloody cancer. F***er took her out in a week… I couldn’t move after that day the Alaskan skies seemed to have dulled in color. White beaches of Mexico just appears like regular biogenic sand to me now… it’s like my desire had been ripped after her electroencephalogram went flat. I don’t know I just had to stay here. I moved into this hotel room about a day later because sometimes my phantom limbs need a distraction. I had spent too much time allowing them to go through boxes of dead things in the attic. It was making me sick.”