Coming home (Part I)

Yes! The blogs are back. I'm bored, and I've been stuck on a little writing project. I thought I'd share it with you all (:





The very first thing my mother had given me was my name. She’d named me after her brother, Jimmy, who had died of pneumonia when he was little. The name had been a gift given to him by my grandmother when he was born many years before me, only to be recycled years later as a gift to me in his memory.

In the spirit of giving, I had forfeited my name into the army. I remember the day I had walked in to the recruitment office. I sat myself in the waiting room, after the woman at the front desk called me up to confirm my meeting. Her eyes looked huge through the intense magnification of her glasses, and her hair and lips seemed to be almost the same startling shade of red. Her fingernails clacked and clicked, and clacked some more, filling the stillness of the room with a constant flow of noise as she continued to work. For a while, it was bearable. I watched her flaming hair bob up and down whilst she worked on her typewriter, listening to her fingers hit the keys as if she were playing a jaunted office symphony.

They took my name and told me from the very first day of training that I was not James Christensen. My name was Private, and so was the man who stood beside me, and the man beside him, and even the man in front of him. With so many men going by the name Private, one had to pay strict attention when his superior was talking, and only the stern glare of a higher ranked officer could indicate exactly which Private he was talking to. We’d march to their cries of ‘left, left, left, right, left,’ and all you would hear is the repetitive thump of our shoes beating the earth. All you would see was a spectacular sea of olive green, rushing steadily forwards and backwards. With each step, I could feel myself drowning, deeper and deeper into the folds of anonymity. Just as they told me, there was no longer a James Christensen.