The World Played Chess

by Robert Dugoni

I am like the pencil I constantly sharpen with a knife; I am just a dull nub of the person I was.

“Growing old is a privilege, not a right.”

It rained earlier, which Cruz said was just Vietnam pissing on us, not the start of the monsoon season.

It happens so quickly, death. One moment you’re here. The next moment you’re gone. Zipped up in a body bag and helicoptered out. The military doesn’t give us time to process the death, because there is no time. They tell us to put it out of our minds. They don’t want you thinking about it. Saddle up and move out. You’re still here. You still have a job to do.

thought, Did EZ’s mother feel something in that moment when his spirit left his body? Was she standing at the sink filling a glass with water while looking out at the backyard where her son played football with his brothers and feel a loss?

That his blood and his spirit had departed this world, that her baby boy had just died?

Did she know? Will my mother know?

“You don’t cheat death,” William said in the garage of that remodel during one of our talks. “You think you do, but you don’t. Death finds you.”

was I looking at this all wrong? Maybe death wasn’t following me. Maybe God had a hand in saving my son. Maybe Beau would have also been in Peter Oxford’s car. Maybe God somehow intervened and spared Beau, spared my family.

“Dying is hardest on the living.”

“Regret is so much harder to live with than failure,” William said.

And I don’t need God. Because I don’t care anymore. I don’t care if I live or die. I no longer fear death. It no longer scares me. It no longer has power over me.

walk in the valley of death and I fear no evil. Because I am the evil. And that is an omnipotent feeling.