At night I look out of a new window.  It is on the third floor of a walk-up and the tree outside doesn’t have any leaves.  Beyond it are the pink clouds of the night time, made electric by the city lights.  All is silhouette.

I hold up my hand against the light.  I am under thick covers borrowed from my roommate.  They are cold winter covers from Ohio, thick wool with hunting scenes and animal prints and I am small underneath them, a tiny child.  There is no heat in this new apartment, but the covers and the whiskey keep me warm and a little relaxed.  My hand waivers against the electric sky and I discover it, large palms, splinters from the move, motion, movement, control.

I sleep.

******

We came here by our own volition.  I move.  Cassie approves.

Heather, our new counselor, is uncomfortable with this.  She recommends that I go to a bar, and Cassie walks in and we pretend we are strangers and I hit on Cassie and maybe Cassie pretends to be someone else and maybe I throw on an accent and play another role and voila, sparks light up 8^th street and we go home and I touch her leg to her thigh and she aches and I thrust and there is sweat and clothes torn asunder and ripped buttons pattering on the ground and we swell and grow and groan and hurt and cry and laugh and love and collapse like supernovas into singularity. 

******

In war, I tell the new soldiers who are assigned to me that after 90 days there is nothing new to experience.  That evening, as I say the speech we are attacked with rockets that punch up from al-Faw palace toward our office across z-lake. 

I have been there six months.  This is the new team’s first day here.  They cringe at the noise and one ducks down and the rockets come closer and closer like god’s footsteps.  I keep talking about where they can get chow and where they will rack out for the night.  The one who has ducked, SGT Christian, shoots me an angry glance, and I keep talking.  I am not trying to be brave or foolish.  I simply no longer care.

The rockets stop.  It is important, I say, that they maintain accountability of their gear and their weapons and that none of them wander off alone.  SGT Christian stands up slowly and the others dust off the bit of dry wall that has fallen and they do not listen to me but I keep talking because if you stop, and if SGT Christian had it her way, the looks would continue and the dark, angry spot in her eye would grow to fear and tremors and paralysis. Better to be angry than afraid, and better to be nothing at all than angry.  Better to soldier on. I show them the KBR tent and the laundry tent on the map and then I dismiss them and the night shift starts their work.

******

I’ve known Cassie ten years.  We have witnessed war and death and love.  We have woken up in La Serena, Chile with the hostellers’ daughter pouncing on our bed yelling “otra ves.” We have been poor and broke and cold and lost on the Australian coast eating beans from a can because we can’t afford anything else.  We have contemplated Hell’s Canyon over Bugler tobacco.  We have broken each other’s hearts, and parked in old wheat fields to make love.  I have held her head on Greyhound buses across Western America and she has held mine in a hospital bed when I was unaware of anything but her warmth.  We are tough as leather and we do not play pretend.

So I move.  I move in with Abe, a friend with a thirsty liver and dirty lungs from the rural mid-West who has shot deer and shared with me his thick Ohio blankets and tonight, a bottle of whiskey.

We spend time with Cassie that night at the bars and she and I do not pretend, and the honesty feels good.  Our friends know.  I have told Abe and the others and so has Cassie and they are surprised and they say love is hopeless if we cannot make it.  We walk to the new home and Abe goes upstairs and I kiss Cassie and hold her and she kisses me and our hands interweave so that when I look at it I cannot tell which fingers are hers and which are mine. I kiss her, and then she goes.  I wave and then shove my hands in my pocket and go upstairs.

We found each other once, we say.  We are fools to say we can do it a second time.  But now we are not pretending, and the space that was between us is now made up of brick and mortar and asphalt and streets and rivers and rails. 

******

In my last month, there is another rocket attack.  When I first get to Baghdad, rockets are common.  They land every other day in sets of a dozen or so.  A Sergeant Major on a run gets lifted off the ground and lands on his head and suffers a concussion and broken arm.  The girl at the DFAC in line for chow disappears and so does the Sergeant beside her. 

But Muqtada al Sadr has called a ceasefire and much of the firing has stopped.  The Surge, the Sunnis, the Sons of Iraq, the Sahwa, have all happened and there is relative peace.  Our prisons are empty.  In this time, in Iraq, the air is trapped in the lungs of all of us, unsure of whether this is all a temporary lull or if this is the unattainable peace.

When the rockets fall I do not sit still patiently and calmly and wait for them to pass. I am alone in my room and I take my flak jacket and I roll off my bed onto the floor with my head down and I start screaming.  I scream at god and I damn him and I tell him fuck you I did not make it this far to die fuck you fuck you fuck you and I am screaming and spitting onto the floor and it is all wasted breath into a hurricane. 

The rockets pass, and I go home. A month later, a rocket falls exactly where I slept and destroys the bed and aluminum and flooring where huddled down and damned god and all his acts.  SGT Christian, cold and alone and still in Iraq sleeps with the Major that was my boss, who is married and has three kids and was on his third deployment in five years and is now on his fourth.

******

Before we settle in and start drinking, I ask Abe to take me to the storage facility in Brooklyn.  He says he didn’t know we had a storage space in Brooklyn and I smile half-proud of my secrets and half-scared to stop pretending. 

Abe waits outside and smokes a cigarette.  There is room now that I am on my own.  My room is big enough and it is only my clutter.  I open the gate and I see the boxes.  I see my black plastic footlocker still wrapped with packing tape and addressed to my parent’s house and locked.  The plastic is cracked but sturdy and I pick it up and carry it down to the car.  I go back upstairs and take the other box, this one cardboard with WAR LETTERS written on it, and inside are the correspondence between her and me and me and her over there and I wonder if I should burn it like the other letters, or if I should take it.  I kick it out the storage space and close the gate.

At the walk up I try to carry the footlocker up the stairs alone, but I cannot put it around a corner in the stair well.  I put it on its end and I try to lift it but cannot because the angle is too extreme and I am a little drunk.  Abe asks me if I need help and I say no and I try to lift the box again.  It cuts my hand a little, just on the outside and only the skin and try again.  Abe walks down the stairs and calls me a stubborn bastard and we carry it to my room.  I go back downstairs and I pick up the cardboard box and put it into my room, too, and then we drink more and get drunk on whiskey and toast and toast and toast to new beginnings.