i'm not bothering with questions.

[anklin]

In training, they tell you not to lie. It goes against every part of you. Kids fucking screaming, mothers pleading for their children, their husband, telling you that you got it all wrong, that they didn't do it, that you don't know what you're talkin about; people bleeding out in your arms. You know the scared teenager is going to die anyway, and all you want to do is say “you’re going to be fine, I have you” if only to see the panic disappear. Instead, you’re told to tell easy truths. Help is on the way. These guys are going to do the best they can. It’s not the harsh of “no, you’re definitely going to fucking die here, bud” that would be a full truth but when they’re that violently gone, “I’m trying my best” doesn’t matter. “You’ll be okay” Except you won’t. Well, maybe you will. Middle class Americans tend, on the whole, to be fucking okay. Chances are that the worst thing that’ll happen to most people is a broken heart and a bit of debt. There’s nothing wrong with that. What lucky bastards we are, and maybe we should all have some fucking cake and a champagne toast to our student loans and messy divorces. Because sometimes you won’t be okay. Sometimes, you’ll spend your entire life starving, in desperate poverty, and die in pain before puberty even really kicks in from some preventable disease that most people don’t realize still exists. Sometimes you’ll work two jobs so you can feed your family and still watch all three of your kids go to shit, warped in a habit, or a life sentence, or a stray bullet. Sometimes you'll be that child, because you just wanted to take a breath without feeling like the world is closing in around you and meth doesn't give a shit about who you love or who you wanted to be. Sometimes you’ll never get out of your circumstance, despite every good intention and every bit of effort you put into it. Sometimes the world will think that things are okay with you but things go sideways, or chemicals running through your bloodstream don’t balance quite right, and you blow your fucking brains out in front of a 23 year-old patrol officer who has never seen a real life dead body, let alone the active act of dying. He’ll shove his hand down the hamburger meat that’s now your lower jaw and try and find an airway, but you’ll die anyway in the end with tubes sticking out of you and doctors around you, dead despite the best efforts of everyone involved and the fact that your dumb ass used fucking bird shot instead of a large caliber round like a real man. Sometimes you’ll be Middle Class American and have a good life but you’ll wake up to your four month old blue and cold because sometimes there’s no reason, sometimes babies just stop breathing air. And you live through it, and keep your job and your money and your husband or your wife, but you will not be okay, not now and not ever. Sometimes you’ll find yourself having had one too many, in a nice part of town, surrounded by nice people and a nice guy that offers to walk you home and then proceeds to take advantage and sometimes you’ll be okay, go to therapy and take a decade to learn to live with it, but sometimes it will break you, sometimes physically, until your body is covered in stab wounds and all those cries for help and all those self-defense classes won’t mean shit. We give each other hope because there’s no other way to survive, because statistically you will be okay. But sometimes you won’t. It’s a cruel fucking lie.