Kill Today So Tomorrow Will Not Come

"Kill Today, So Tomorrow Will Not Come is a searing and heart-breaking story of young love shattered by war and the heroic efforts of a severely wounded soldier to recover from moral and physical injuries and reclaim his life.""I'm done with half-truths. I'm done with being told I'm going to get better when I don't know who I am, or who I was. I need to see my face. I need to see the I hidden under the gauze bandage that's covered my head for the past two months. I swivel out of bed, lift myself into my wheel chair, and roll into a bathroom reeking of antiseptic and piss. The harsh florescent light kills my eyes. I peel the bandage back from my skull, grip the sink, and pull myself up from the wheelchair. A sharp stab shoots through the open wound on my left arm. I grip tighter to stand, but my good hand can't hold me. I fall back, almost topple over, rest to catch my breath. Sweat slides over the wire sutures running along my juggler vein and across my skull. I wipe the beads off with the fingers of my right hand, scratch at the prickly stitches on my head. 'What are the wire sutures for? To keep my brain from falling out? If I bow my head, will the gray entrails of my brain spill out, my life dangle from the wire sutures like thick worms?' My fingers search for a hole in my frontal lobe, but there's only a depression where the shrapnel pierced my skull. I want to give up, roll back to the Head Ward and sit in front of the window, gaze absently at the snow-capped mountain rising from the distant horizon. I want to, but I can't. I roll a few inches closer, grip the sink with my good hand, lift, stand, hold. As I rise to stand, my hand weakens, and starts to slip off the edge. I thrust my left arm out to stop my fall. A red-hot knife pierces my arm and shoots up to my brain. I've stretched too far. The four-inch by three-inch gash along my left forearm tears open and starts to bleed. The raw flesh, jagged and torn like the frayed belly of a salmon, trickles a thin, red stream. The gauze bandage turns pink. Fuck it. I bite back the pain, grip the sink, and lift my head to the mirror. Tiny wire stitches run from one side of my skull to the other where the cranial flap was pulled back for the neurosurgeon's saw. There's a dent about the size of a matchbook where the shrapnel smashed into my right forehead, pierced the skull, and lodged inside my frontal lobe. 'This is not my face. No, the eyes are wrong, the cheeks stretched too tight against the bone.' I want to kill this face. I want to break it into a million mirrored shards. I raise my right hand, ball it up, reach back to shatter its reflection with my fist. Halfway through the punch, I pull back, press my bare knuckles against the glass. I open my hand, touch my face, walk my fingers over the cheeks, lips, and eyes, wonder what name I can put on this pain I feel throbbing in my mind. But there is no name, not for this. Absence maybe, but absence stained with grief. The heartache of something taken, of something lost; the grief of a body tagged without a name. I am nineteen. I am in a hospital in Yokohama, Japan. My future stares back with dead eyes. I roll back to the ward and pull the blankets over my head.