collateral damage

I once wrote that being at home is the bread and butter to my writing. And that will continue to be true...so long as my writing remains angst-driven and teenage like. A regular Twilight novel, sans glittering skin in the sun. Being drafted into and allowed back from the war of first semester law school, it felt like a homecoming was the exact right remedy, and its sweet syrupy-ness should have lingered longer. But it wasn't. And it didn't. Again the protagonist is reduced to furious, incomprehensible salt drops in a locked bathroom, as only living with blood-bound relations can conjure. Over a fight that she wasn't even a part of. How can kids from divorces, the mother of all such fights, survive it? The spoils of a different kind of war, the children sit unnoticed amid the canon fumes. After the battle. After the conquer and divide. After the newly-minted declarations and anthems. Someone notices the kids again. Their silence the loudest all along. I wonder how they survive it. Because like a vaccine, these little bursts of regular, self-introduced venom keeps the real thing at bay. So tonight was only a decimal of what the true veterans have come back from. How do they survive their Vietnam when I can barely survive the empty words of the Cold War?

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