Entry 9

I'm hopelessly restless. My father's speech in honor of Canaan's anniversary is coming up. I have to attend the speech, so I'm being held off active duty. Worse yet, my father has banned me from base housing. There has been a rumor going around that I slept with the wife of a very important officer and as he doesn't want a scandal, I have been pushed into close quarters with my mother.

I hate my mother. She is a defeated shell of a woman. She rarely ever leaves the house. She scuttles nearly silently from room to room. Worst of all, she isn't used to having me around, so she feels the constant need to pamper and talk. I have no interest in pampering and no use for talk. My only solace is in the time I spend at the gym and even that seems doomed to go badly. Some fool actually made a move on me today! He tried to pick me up! Who wanders around a gym looking for a wife? Better yet, who finds one under two hundred and fifty pounds of iron on a bench press. If I was one of those hoity-toity bitches in short shorts and a halter top, I could see it. I see them with their five pound rubber weights and all I want is to smash their faces into those floor to ceiling mirrors that they love so much. I go to the gym to stay fit. Of all the places I have picked up women, I have only ever picked up one at the gym.

If the only mother I had ever heard stories about as my mother was the Safi King who bakes pies and prattles endlessly, I might not feel the way I do about her. However, years ago when I was still settling into this family, I found a picture of her when she was younger. She had a wild afro, this torn shirt, and a bullhorn. You could see she was screaming. The picture had been taken in her hometown in 2000. Thousands of people had been kept of the voting rolls and she had led a protest. I'm told she stayed at the protest for two weeks solid, until the police came out and broke the place up. Even then she had to be dragged away. There was a clipping of newspaper with her mug shot. Apparently, she knocked two teeth out of an officer's mouth when he tried to drag her off. That's a woman I would like to know. That's a mother I would like to have.

As it is, she fits perfectly with my biological mother. Both lived their lives dragged around by dumber but strong-willed men. Both stood by and said nothing as my fathers abandoned them. I don't know if it was Esau or Kali who broke Safi King's spirit, but that woman with the bullhorn is gone. I would sooner be dead than live to become what she is now.

Entry 6 - The Prison

I'm going to start by saying that I don't know where anyone gets off following this journal. Who the fuck follows someone else's personal journal? Don't you have anything better to do with your lives. I'd rather not be writing it personally.

Second, I haven't been writing recently because I've been in places where there are no computers, makes it hard. So the doctor can kiss my ass. He seems to think I'm going to drag an actual notebook around to enter my thoughts in when I'm not here. Fuck that. I'm a fucking soldier, when I am at work I am concerned with one thing and one thing only and that is staying alive. I don't bring a gun to your office, yet, and I don't bring the journal to the field. I'm putting up with you exactly as long as I have to to be done with this, don't forget that.

Today I'm supposed to write about my experiences as a child in the immigrant camps during the war. I don't know what to say. There was never enough food. The camp was filled with thieves, murderers, and the terminally ill -- all of whom would do anything they had to to get out of that camp. My father was one of them, my mother was just weak and fool enough to get pulled into my father's world.

They picked us up out of a small house we were all living in in the Miami area. There was my family and two others, each of them with multiple children. One family had older boys who always beat on myself and the other girl in the house mercilessly. Had we all been a little older, they seemed like just the type to try and rape us, luckily for them life is simpler as a child. The police stormed the house at three in the morning. All of them were white and they all seemed enormous to me at the time. One knocked me to the ground. I think I was knocked unconscious, because the next thing I remember is waking up in my mothers arms on the truck to the prison. She was fussing over me, but I noticed that the father of the two boys was nowhere to be seen. Mother said that he had tried to fight back and that the white men had shot him. I later found out it was my own father who had talked him into attacking the guards, he had sworn he would be right behind him. My father always hated that man.

The prison (I say prison because camp is a euphemism, camping is fun) was packed with men and women in little concrete long-houses with cheap wooden roofs. Everyone had to share a bunk with at least one other person and they never divided the population by sex. That of course meant that rape and pregnancy were rampant. It's hard to say which one was worse as there wasn't enough food to feed the people who were already there. They were supposed to have shipped out more than half the people who were there already, but we had a bad hurricane season and they had to delay the ships. The hurricane season also meant it was always wet in camp. Lots of people came down with gangrene and pneumonia. More or less, it was hell.

The camp was miles and miles away from any inhabited city, which meant there was only us and the all male guards, contracted through some government security firm. Now that I look back at it, what happened seems inevitable. Like I was fated to become the person I am today. It feels like my whole life has been drawn as a single line, leading to this moment. I'm sure it's a single line through the future as well, stopping with one sudden sharp shock.

Entry 4

Apparently, I'm finally taking this seriously enough. My psychiatrist was very impressed by my last post in its "honesty" and "raw emotion". He says I should try and bring more of that to my journal and that only through that process can I truly work out my "problems". I then shared with him the raw emotion I was having at the time. He didn't seem as bothered as I thought he would be at the image of my scooping out his eyeballs and feeding them to him. I think he's been threatened before.

So, today I am supposed to write about my father. Not Esau, who is my adopted father, but my real father. I don't know exactly what he wants me to say, but I have to start somewhere.

My father was a scumbag. He was a thief, a liar, and a con-man. After I was born and he was forced to marry my mother, he had the bright idea that America was the land of opportunity. He made my mother pack up and leave her life in Port-au-Prince to enter the states illegally. At that point, the fires in the west were at their worst and with all the people fleeing from the Midwest he was sure that no one would ever know that we weren't locals.

I suppose it worked for a few years, until they started rounding up all the immigrants and putting them into camps. That camp in Florida was the last place I saw him. I figure he died with the rest of them, not that he ever meant anything to me. His last great act as my father was to sell my mother to the guards for extra rations.

Do I hate my father? Yes, but not nearly as much as I hate my mother. That man at least gave me something useful, the skill of survival. Had death come for him in any other form, he would have dodged it no doubt. Meanwhile, my mother was one of those helpless wives that just let herself and her daughter get dragged into the abyss.