Shoot or be Shot

*This is an amalgam of a thought I’ve had in the past and present occassionally (almost rarely) mixed together with a speech I have begun to lay out for a character in one of my works.  That sounds a bit vague, I’m sure, but I tend to be a bit private with my writings.  Eventually when they are published then you may know what I mean. *

Some days, I feel like death.  I wake up tired and wander through the day with my mind somewhere else, some other place not in this world.  Not sure if it means I’m dead already or that I might as well be, suppose it doesn’t really matter.  All the same, I stand and listen to the wind and hear it bringing whispers from a far off place of peace and I think I’d like to go there.  Would I find it, if I die?  Will I find it, if I’m already dead?  I know already a part of me is gone, I can see it when I look at my reflection.  Others tell me I don’t look the same as I once did.  I see it, too.  But none of us seem to know what it is that is truly gone.  Did it leave me upon the wind?  When I hear it whisper the part of me that’s missing seems to ache as if it’s hearing something it once knew and loved, something familiar.  How can a person be familiar with death?  I’ve seen my fair share of dead men, I’ve killed quite a few, none of them seem to look like they saw it coming or that it was what they expected.  Even the ones lying with peaceful eyes and folded arms seem to have a certain air about em — something frightening and altogether unsettling.  And yet, maybe, that is just the part of us that wants to linger here that thinks that.  Maybe we are always torn between two worlds.  Maybe when we choose good over bad, bad over good, we just come to another crossroad and it never stops.  Always choosing, never really getting anywhere final.  Maybe not.  The wind seems to whisper otherwise, that at the end of it is the end.  The one I’m lookin’ for. 

Yet I’m not just goin to let it happen.  I look down at my hand somedays and wonder why there ain’t no gun in it.  I feel like I should be out there, in the open air again, taking my paces — waiting.  At first it was never about nothin’ like that, dyin’.  I can’t even tell you when it changed.  But now it’s all I think about and all I ever did in the end.  I was just waitin’ for the day that I would lose….waitin’ for the day that God or someone would decide for me where I was to go and what I was to do next.  Til then I wait here, thinkin’ about the men I sent to a place I long to go.  Waitin’ for the next man to come along.  Listenin’ to the wind.