Everyone has to die sometime.

Have you ever had one of those dreams where you're running as hard and as fast as you can but no matter how hard you try you can't go any faster, you can't get where you need to go? Like you aren't the one who's in control of your own body, and whatever it is that you're running to or from just fades away and you're all alone, doing everything you can just to keep moving forward?

Now, have you ever had one of those dreams where you're falling into a deep black hole and you jerk awake soaked in sweat and wondering why you'd rather just keep falling forever rather than coming around in a pace like this?

When you were little it was different. Dreams used to be about freedom. Instead of falling you would fly, instead of running you would dance, instead of waking up in the dark, hot and terrified, you would open your eyes to your favorite teddy bear and the early morning sunshine, because even when you were woken by the screaming or the banging you could cover your head with your blankets and pretend that you were someplace else, conjure up whole worlds in your mind. But somewhere between those days and these ones you've forgotten what it is to honestly believe that everything will be alright. The thought used to reassure you, even make you smile, but now you smile for a different reason: because happy endings have become a ludicrous idea. You go through the motions day by day, and maybe someday your happily ever after will be a bullet in the brain, and maybe then you'll have some peace.

The loss of control is the thing that bothers you the most. Not that there isn't structure. That's the one thing that's guaranteed. They've also put a gun back in your hand, and taught you how to actually use it, so that the only time that you feel like you have any power at all is when you're pulling the trigger and smelling the gunpowder, and feeling the recoil of this metal thing that has become an extension of your arm, so similar to the one that started you down this very path to hell. But even this is not in your control; it is how they have laid out your life; in a framework of their own making that will box you in until you die, which considering everything may just be sooner rather than later, and you think that just might not be a bad thing, not that you'd say that out loud. But once upon a time you made your own choices. Once upon a time you were the one who chose whose turn it was to die.

You remember other things about real life, outside the walls where there are trees and strangers and animals, seasons and daylight and moonlight and stars and fresh air.

You used to have a last name, not that it's much of a loss as it was his last name too, meaning you could never fully escape from him. There used to be people who would try to help you, who actually had good intentions. Sure, they were mostly cops, and social workers and the like, and you rarely said a word to any of them, but they were there, and they were real, and they only wanted the best for you. Until it was too late, and the best you could ever hope for was a gun in your hand and the face of a person you had never met running through your mind for the rest of your life, dead because those were the rules, dead because you killed them.

You used to think about them for months afterwards. You would wonder if they had children, husbands or wives, friends, pets, lovers. You would wonder if they actually deserved to die. And then you stopped wondering, and stopped asking, and for the most part even stopped caring, because if they were meant to die then so be it, and it didn't really matter who pulled the trigger. Better luck on the other side, not that you believe in that sort of thing. When you've lead the life that you have, there are certain things you just can't bring yourself to believe in.

You tell yourself that you could be dead, that you could be back where you started, that you might have never pulled that trigger, and for just an instant every decision you have ever made is justified, because they all come from that one moment when you weighed that heavy steel in your small hand for the first time, when you emptied the clip of that gun into his body, and felt his warm blood spray back at you as he fell for the last time. You still remember the shock of the recoil that nearly took you off your feet. You still remember the shock on his face as he died and you still remember how it felt, for the first time in your life, to feel relief, and you hang onto all of it, because you know that you will never regret that moment, and you will learn to accept all the others since. You know it, and they know it, and that's why they will always win. He was your first, and everyone knows that you'll meet your last on the day you die. Everyone has to die sometime, it's one of the two things that's guaranteed in life. The other is birth. The rest is just the game we play. These are the chronicles of a recruit.