Ode to Sadie Margaret

The last time I saw you, Sadie Margaret, was two hours ago, and again you’re gone entering a third one. The bed I thought you would occupy is instead taken by someone else. Trevor lies across the mattress next to me, and I remain silent as a stone, with my books and my journals, my paper and my pens, my pencils and my thoughts of you.

All we wanted was to get by the checkpoint. All we wanted was to have them believe our ID cards. All we wanted was to be left alone. But the soldier didn’t leave us alone. He didn’t believe you at the very least. He looked at our IDs and believed us all. He believed Uriel; he believed Tristan; he even believed me. But he didn’t believe you. You were the last person to have your ID checked, and he didn’t bother to believe you. Instead he shoved you to the ground like a naturalist wrestling with some exotic wild animal. Then he slammed on the handcuffs so hard you’d think he cracked every single bone in your wrists. And finally he dragged you off the RV. Well, he tried on his own. He tried to restrain your legs. He tried to shoot you. He even tried to taser you. But it didn’t work with just one person. Finally two more soldiers got on board and restrained you while he tasered you. And then they dragged you off to their military caravans.

Meanwhile all I could do was sit there and stare at you. What else could I do? Try freeing you? Then I would have been killed. Plead with the soldiers? Then all of us would have been dead. Help them arrest you? Then I would have relinquished the right to call myself a human. So what else could I do but watch? What else could I do but keep quiet? What else could I do but keep the greater evil from happening?

And then, when we pulled away, I watched them shoot you in the head. I watched them, in the distance that grew and grew, rape you and shove you in the van chair. I watched as they bound your hands and feet so tight you’d think you were a wild boar they caught and planned to eat for dinner. In a sense that is what they do to people who get captured, even if they don’t actually put you on the table in fancy plates of china. I have no idea what they did to you after they locked you inside that van, and I have no idea what they’re doing to you right now, and I have no idea what they plan on doing to you next.

But chances are you’re already dead. They’ve probably shot you by now at their base and left you there to rot a while and shoved you into a mass grave bigger than a hundred Olympic swimming pools. Nobody to claim your body for a real burial, nobody to speak your eulogy, nobody to cry for you when they shoved you in the ground and buried you. The only person willing to do anything is miles away. And all I can do is scribble a bunch of stupid words on a piece of notebook paper and carry your possessions for you.

The last time I saw you, Sadie Margaret, was two hours ago, and again you’re gone entering a third. And that’s probably the last time I’ll ever see you. Meanwhile I sit on a bed at a shelter you never arrived at, with a man I don’t even know taking up the mattress you’ll never occupy, having nothing to keep me company except my books and my journals, my paper and my pens, my pencils and the mementos which once belonged to you.