Only the Rain

by Randall Silvis

Personally, I’ve come to believe that theories are of small value when it comes to actually living your life, to making all the hard decisions you have to make and then dealing with the consequences of those decisions.

“Life’s a shit pie, soldier. But when that’s all you’re given to eat, you better learn to like the taste of it.”

I watched the rain sheeting off the glass with every swipe of the wiper blades, and that’s when I realized something. The trouble got started in a rainstorm, and now it was going to end in a rainstorm. How it would end was still to be seen.

And when some of us do come back in one piece, and we take off the uniforms and let our hair grow out, and we try to look like we were never in those places and never did what we know we did, deep down there’s a poison in our blood that will never go away. More than ever now we just want to be loved and safe but there’s always a dirtiness inside us. It won’t wash out and the more we try to not think about it, we only think about it more.

In this vale of tears, as Gee used to call it, all we get is the rain.