Trained Killer

She calls him the trained killer. The brother of the woman next door who’s come to stay in the other room at the bed & breakfast. When I meet him, he pulls away from his cigarette to shake my hand. The sleeve of his black t-shirt rolls up just enough to show the tattoo on muscled arms. Sunglassed eyes and shaved head. The trained killer reminds me of my post-high school boyfriend. Jason. Tattooed, casual, tough, military.

Well, now that he’s finally seen ya, lock your doors tonight! Barbara winks at me. (There’s one flimsy wooden door separating the apartment I rent from the extra bed & breakfast room the trained killer is sleeping in.)

Southern days pass. It’s Sunday and we’re sitting on the porch, post drunken-cowboy episode, his single black backpack is packed. He’s trained for chemical warfare treatment – but since little is used in Afghanistan, he’ll be part of the regular infantry duties. He promises to take care…and adds that he’ll take care of those around him. He says his last goodbyes then. Barbara orders him to come back. He says that he will. That (looking at the beige columns and wrought iron basking in the molten sunset), this house has always felt like his second home. I look down at my camera as the trained killer’s words become muddled with something that sounds like emotion. We’ll sit here and live this life, while he walks off down to where Royal Street meets Esplanade, off to fight a war no one is really committed to anymore.

Nineteen, I’m clutching the iron post in the Sea-Tac south satellite at 4 a.m. in the morning, as I try to watch his last steps away from me and into the dark terminal. But I can hardly see or stand, the room has filled with water and there’s a bloody, painful gash where I thought I’d once felt my heart beating for the first time. The first person I ever loved turns one last time to wave, the first tears I’d seen from him now streaming down his freckled face. Two kids preparing to be tossed into a sea of uncertainty as he travels half the world and I finish collage. Unlikely match for a straight-A student. His barbed wire tattoos sneak from under his T-shirt sleeve, before they disappear. My tears are lost in my long hair I’ll chop off 2 weeks later and not grow back for a decade.

Twenty-nine, disembarking from a 6 hour flight from Mexico, we board the escalators and it’s the same terminal, the same iron post, a different life. Nic asks me what it is I’m looking at.

I just remembered something I thought I’d forgotten. And smile as we walk away.