K. Syrah was born in Asia, raised in Europe before making her home in the United States. She grew up assimilating and critiquing various cultures. She spent her first six years of adulthood in seven different states, and hasn’t stopped moving since. Her ability to analyze culture as an outsider has fueled her writing, much of which can be found on her social-commentary themed weblog, Shoes Never Worn. She is one half of a dual-military couple that will soon be experiencing a simultaneous deployment to two different theatres.
14. Memorial Day
How much more broken could I be? How much darker could things get? Could they be darker, considering the fact that the ghosts seem to have drifted away, like smoke being pulled away by a cool breeze. Yet there felt like there would be so much more, like I was standing on a path, and seeing my destination, a distant point in the horizon.
13. Cross The Bridge
I could hear footsteps, other than my own, echoing from beyond the trees that lined the paths. I knew who it was lurking in the shadows, the same blue eyes that lurked in the darkness, crawling like a specter, silencing the birds, and turning the trees so that it’s branches pointed their spindly fingers at the woman who should have been dead, as she walked by.
12. Red
He only came out at night, when Wilder would sweetly sleep beside me, his arm laying over my shoulder, as I stared into the darkness of the other room, through the open bedroom door. I could see him in the black shadows, always hazy at first, thinking that I could blink him away. Then as the seconds ticked by, he’d become more real.
11. Seeing Ghosts
I looked at the faces around me; the mothers who grabbed their children’s hands and pulled them along, telling them not to look. I saw the men who looked, unperturbed, or almost inconvenienced by my scene, the sand, the diesel, the burned out truck, the radios, the sound of boots on sand, and the soldiers mechanically responding to a crisis from rote memory.
10. Crawl-Walk-Run
He seemed like he was doing the most gentlemanly thing, and I was getting used to him doting on me. Sometimes I was bitter, feeling like I wasn’t given the opportunity to be self-sufficient, but who was I kidding? I couldn’t walk. In fact, I haven’t been self-sufficient from the day that they told me that Charles was dead.
