I Think We Should All Go Back Home

“I Think We All Should Go Back Home”
The flights from Moscow to JFK were grueling. Twelve hours. My experience in the army felt much shorter than my return home. Home sounded wonderful. Comfort, rest, and relaxation. It seemed that those three things had been taken away from me, even before a gun was placed in my idle hands.
In the summer of 2013 just before the first Russian attack on the British submarine, I had been working as a student full time in my junior year in addition to my “wonderful” part time job. I had gotten good grades at NYU, but that didn’t mean I was an excellent worker at night. What a terrible duty I had. Sure, I reached out my neck pretty far to get any job available, and this was the only application which I had received an interview for. I was really desperate for money, and at one point I considered dealing drugs and becoming a prostitute. Instead of that grand idea, I jumped into the cleaning business. Awful decision.  If someone told me to do work in the janitorial services now, I would rapidly decline and probably spit in their face. Nobody deserves to clean up smeared feces on the walls of a cubicle. Yes, that actually happened. Some guy apparently freaked out about getting fired, and decided to focus his rant with his crap all over the cloth lined cubicle walls. Honestly, if you are in a tirade over something utterly ridiculous please don’t make a mess to prove a point. Because whoever made you into such a fury probably isn’t a janitor, which means they are not cleaning up the horrid mess you decided to unleash. So, thank you masked man, with all sarcasm aside of course, I loved cleaning up your putrid, dead smelling, garbage poop.
Working as a cleaner gave me a new perspective on life. It made me realize what my true ambitions were. Before that, I don’t think I appreciated anybody or anything. Everything simply existed. It really reflected how I felt about my domestic problems. I never knew my mother. She passed a few days after my birth. My world hadn’t ever been perfect, although this truly strengthened my relationship with my father. My father displayed his pain over losing her all the time. He began to act as if he were drunk on sorrow vivaciously, but extremely in my freshman year of college. He would randomly build things which had nothing to do with anything. They had no purpose whatsoever. One time he tried to build a boat without any direction or reason to. I didn’t want to ever intrude upon Noah constructing his ark, but I felt concerned for him. This was when I decided he had become insane.
My life was largely governed by my father, but not too heavily. He wasn’t an incredibly strict man as some of my friends’ parents were in high school. One time my friend Bill wanted to go on a date with a girl, and actually had already booked a table at a restaurant. An hour before, his mother strictly slammed down the law. She wanted him to scrub anything that reeked of dirt. This included cleaning the bathroom, his bedroom, the basement, the barn, the kitchen, and I wouldn’t dismiss the possibility that he had to clean an outhouse. She obviously didn’t want her “peach” of a son to get any girl pregnant. Because that is all teens ever want to do anyways. But no, my father was never as strict as this woman. He was just more eccentric than the other parents. Caring less of himself and more about me not becoming what he had become. It was quite relaxing to know that his oddities were apparent to him. It was almost as if my father could sometimes control his strange behavior, but it was obvious he was holding something back. Only during nights would he unleash this unraveled beast inside of him on these horrifically strange projects.
His condition became worse after I had returned from NYU my junior year. We distanced ourselves socially, because I had changed from the insecure sheltered child to a more analytical, observant man. Sometimes even, I would hear him leave at five at night and not return until three in the morning.  It seemed to me, that the more political turmoil our country had been involved in directly affected my father’s behavior. Russia became an enemy just as I had become an enemy of my father. One thing led to the other, and soon our troops were landing in Belarus, Ukraine, and other surrounding nations. It became a global war almost instantaneously.
With the destruction of political diplomacy in both Europe, and in my own home, everything started to fall apart. My father lost his mind completely that summer. He was fired from his job. All focus was lost with him, and his reasoning became a huge issue. I decided that it was best for him to go to a psychiatric ward. In one of his more somber, accepting moods I talked to him about his problems. He felt confused, and hurt by his change in attitude. His memory was fading as was the existence of his soul. It only suited him to go into a more helpful environment. I felt terrible putting him in a position like that. Nobody really knew how the hospitals worked. I just imagined it was like One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, which was a horrific comparison to use.
With that, I had no idea what to do. I couldn’t return to college because I had no money, and I couldn’t get a job because I wasn’t qualified for anything except for cleaning. And that would be the last choice I would ever take up. Therefore, I was left with only one choice. I had to include myself with problematic American politics, if not world politics. I threw myself into the first organized war since World War II.
Getting there was a rush. People waved their farewells with a new sort of respect. Though I never got to say goodbye to my father I always felt like he was there cheering me on.  It felt like we were finally doing something in the name of freedom. It was a breath of fresh air, until I actually arrived in the desolate world of Russia. Nothing existed there. Buildings were completely decimated. I had only seen such things in pictures of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It was awful. I would rather not detail my war experiences. All of them bring sadness to my eyes, and an odd nostalgia of loneliness. But for two years I fought. Every single day left scars upon my soul. The amount of torture I had seen. The amount of hate I had seen. The amount of hell I had seen. All these things amounted to my distrust in freedom. What was freedom? What did it mean to me? And how could we live in a free world at home, when people were dying for the wrong cause every single day. It didn’t make any logical sense. I had become a cleaner again. But instead of wiping away the fecal matter on a cubicle, I was blowing away gray matter on a battlefield.
Endless, useless fighting led me to an end of my tour. Nothing had progressed. Politicians promised a diplomatic solution, but anything that sounded reasonable appeared as a lie after what I had seen. But who understands politics anyways? I returned home near the end of the summer in 2015.
I got to my kitchen to see piles and piles of letters strewn across the floor in front of the door. All the mail for two years. Nobody was home to ever read through it. My father must still have been in the hospital. We wrote letters to one another in my early stages of the army, but eventually they faded with time. I assumed he hadn’t written those letters anyways. They appeared to be very general topics we talked about, never getting too personal. Who knows? I decided that I would visit him that afternoon, just to see how he had been doing the past two years. I missed him too much. Being alone in the war as an independent mind drew me off from the murderous pack of soldiers I companied myself with. Only my thoughts could influence my emotions then, and often times I thought of my father. Only towards the end of the fighting did I realize how influential he had become on my life. He gave me peace in war.
My arrival at the insane asylum was familiar. It resembled everything that was so dear to me. I walked up to a receptionist behind the front desk with a glum smile. She returned with big red spread out lips, blasting some sort of happiness propaganda from her teeth. It didn’t penetrate my somber attitude.
“Hello sir! How are you?”
She had a very bubbly personality. I had a feeling that she was incredibly lonely.
“I’m just fine. I was wondering about a patient here. My father…”
“All right. Hmm. Let me check. What is his last name?”
“Owens. Mark Owens”
“Is that all one last name?”
I wanted to be a complete jerk to her just then, but I refrained, because she may have greeted rudeness with even more lofty airheaded-ness.
         “No.”
         “Okay. What is his name then?”
         “Mark Owens.”
         “Is his first name Owens?”
Then I snapped and punched her in the mouth. But not really.
         “No. First name, Mark. Last name, Owens. Mark Owens.”
She seemed to have a quizzical look on her face. Strange, she had been so sure of herself before.
         “Sir, Mr. Owens passed about a year and a half ago.”
         “What do you mean he passed? He left?”
         “Well…yes.”
         “Do you have any idea where he might have gone?”
         “Sir, your religious beliefs are your own personal ideas. I can’t influence the--”
They must have hired mental patients onto the payroll to cut back on costs. Because this lady was clearly absent-minded.
         “So…he died? How?”
         “Yes sir. Sorry. Actually wait. He still has a file here…and is your name Roger?”
In shock I responded.
         “Yeah… That’s me.”
         “Well, here you are. You can keep this.”
The front read “Mark Owens: Patient #453 Start: 6/9/13 End: 1/23/14(Death by heart attack)
He was scheduled to leave 2/14/14.”
She handed me the folder. How unbelievable. My father had passed away, and nobody ever told me. This was the only person I loved. The only person I knew. Not until the war did I realize his purpose in my life, but I felt like we had connected somehow with distance.
I peeked inside the file. Only one sheet of paper was inside. Nothing else. It was a letter addressed to me from my father. It read:
Dear Roger,
         I’m sorry for everything that has happened these past few years. My mind became unstable as a result of overwhelming stress and I lost all focus of what was true. In that commotion and obvious neglect, I lost my only true friend, brother, and son. For what has felt like decades, these few months in this hospital have brought me an incredible amount of self respect, and confidence. What I am truly lacking though, is a sense of love. One that I had given you, and you had indirectly given back to me. I ruined what could have continued as a beautiful family, and I am sorry for that. My actions had brought you to the frontlines of a war. No father wants his son to die for the wrong reasons. And it was obvious that you went for the wrong reason. Because of money. Because of me. My failure as your father is only apparent in what you deem as inappropriate and ridiculous. This is why I am writing this letter. I am asking for forgiveness. And I am asking for a start to something far more important than either of us could have imagined a few months ago. I hope you can bring yourself to see me again someday, and I will be waiting for you when the war has decided that you are much too important to be involved with it.
                                                                                         Love,
                                                                                         Your Father
I cried the hardest I had ever cried. I cried for the war, and the death I saw. I cried for the loss of my father, my mother. I cried for suffering in any sort of way. But I also cried for beauty. The vision of a child’s smile brought solace to my sobs. They gently floated away. A release from all pains. There was so much to love. There was so much to live for. My ambitions seemed faded and destroyed, but they were just shadowed for a period. I came to my senses in time to realize that nothing could stop me from becoming who I had always wanted to be. Not a cleaner of any sort. But a builder. One that doesn’t have to clean up messes, and rather creates the future. Instead of being on the delayed path of the lower class, I could become the number one man. Start a new future. Build a beautiful world that had been lost in war that had been lost in greed, and had been lost in technology. It was a duty that was meant to exist.