Why Don't you take responsibility.

I see the sun rising on the shores of Thailand. It's been days since I saw my platoon buddies in the rubber-neck packs of fanatics swarming through the streets"meddlesome maniacs we call them. Bullets burn through the souls of tomorrow’s college graduates as I try to look past the dead and over or underneath the decrepit, rodent-infested bodies. My eyes wander over the sands of Mother Nature, upon the beach-porch continent of a rich man’s war like quick sand.

I think back into the past. When my life wasn’t so surreal and two hours before I wrote this, when I didn’t have a bullet lodged into my torso as I sought refuge in the hands of a lord I may not even believe truly exists. Nonetheless, we all pick our paths in life, that’s for sure. I clamp my fingers down to increase the pressure on the bleeding wound of my buried soul.

My insides begin to slip out as my grip on life starts to shatter like the glass bottle my mother threw at my father when I was five years old. That was the day he walked out of our lives.

Sorry, I didn’t mean to lie. Let me tell you how it really was. In the last moments of my life, why not be honest for a change? It was me who walked away from my son when he was only nine"the tender age of nine. Reasons for my actions are still unknown to this day. But I know it stemmed from the grass roots of my insecurities as a man and my inability to take responsibility for what I had created. Jacob must be at least 27 years old now. Just look at how time flies! I wonder if he’ll let me back into his life. Or does he hate me more than the decision that still plagues me and my wishing to be a father to my only son.

I can still hear his cries to be loved, hugged, and shadowed by a man who was supposed to take him to Little League on Thursday and pick him up from Boy Scouts on Friday nights. His mother did it all. I wonder how"we haven’t talked for years. I never even kissed her good bye. I just dropped a crumbled note on her bedside like it was a trash bag filled with unwrapped gifts. It probably crinkled around her finger tips and splashes of tears must have run down her face like a broken faucet.

It read, “I’m just not ready.”

Who and what had I become?

I've always allowed my limited thinking to corrupt my soul’s desire to live free and die without any regrets. To be the man I should have been, to take responsibility for my life rather than running away from my responsibilities.

The sands of time and reality hit my wounds once more, for every time the water splashes on my bullet-ridden side, I delve deeper.

The sun sinks deep into Poseidon’s bosom; I close my eyes once more.

And I wonder.