Soldier

All I saw in my dreams, my papers, my classmates..was that man's face. My mother finally convinced me to see a psychologist, and I agreed, anything to make this go away. We talked and talked, and for a time it helped. I actually managed to finish college with higher spirits. I even met a woman, Elise, my first wife. Although talking helped with the feelings, there was something else, something that I tried to dismiss. I saw things. Not all the time, not even regularly, just sometimes..at first. I would hear someone say something before they said it. Sometimes people that I particularly didnt like would slip when they walked past me..or worse. In one instance an instructor that was failing me was accused of raping a student, not only was he dismissed, he was arrested. Strange things like this happen all the time. But not to the same man. I thought for awhile that it was nothing more than a strange series of coincidences, that I only thought I saw what I did when I did. But Deja vu only explains the occasional. Living your entire life feeling that way..does things to your mind. I had to know if I was crazy. So I made a decision to myself that the next time this thing would happen I wouldnt say anything just watch..and make sure that I wasnt insane. One day just before graduation I was sitting at the kitchen table in my house. My mother was dicing potatos for dinner. I was finishing some studying, and the feeling came over me..a kind of electricity, a shudder. I looked up and saw her cutting, then as she lifted the handle of the french cleaver and brought it down she sliced into her finger and kept on chopping as the blood ran all over the cutting board. I knew what was happening it had happened enough by now that I could tell the sensation. I blinked hard, and when my eyes opened she was still cutting. I was breathing a sigh of relief when I heard her yell. When I looked up..she was bleeding from her finger..she recieved thirteen stitches. I wasnt crazy, I was something else. Whatever good the psychologist had done me, was undone in a single moment. There wasnt anything wrong with me, there was something wrong with everything, I was just a part of it. I began to test it, with Elise, with dad and mom, and even at school. It was always the same, I saw things before they happened, or maybe I caused them. The truth that this was happening, was harder to believe than the lie that I was crazy. When I graduated in the fall of 1952 I was coming apart. Elise and I had separated and I was deteriorating. My parents tried to get me to speak to the counciler again, but I refused I knew the truth, I just didnt know how to cope with it. The nightmares were worse than they had ever been, and that nameless man was in everyone. Everywhere, screaming those terrible screams. I was going crazy, this time..it was real.

I believed that everything was a lie, and for some terrible unkown reason I was the only one that knew the truth. Then, by chance, or maybe not for that matter I met Russell. I was walking, back then I did that alot. It helped, to be away from people, I was seeing and feeling things more and more, and as my visions grew people shied away even more. It was as if I was becoming something that terrified them.