The war for peace

Jared never liked people who sit around all day drinking aperol spritz’s and sunbathing in their backyard, wearing a sunbonnet. He could just imagine the sweat dripping from their brows after they fall asleep while reading one of their romance novels, the peeled red skin, the dropped jaw after realizing the sun burns red. 

                  Jared would never have this problem. He was always working, or thinking, or doing. What happened to the kitchen counter? There is a spot of mustard on it. The back patio needs to be weeded. Do bugs think they are hidden just because they are in a shadow? Taxes are due in four months, time to make money!

                  He walked down the street, eyeing the woman lying in her hammock, smiling as if everything was perfect. How do people do it? He thought. How can people be so obtuse about life? He hurries on, not wanting to get caught in the laser beam of his neighbors. His feet were hurting though, the boils on them protesting for him to relax. He felt a twinge of pain in his chest, his heart calling for a break.  He stopped for one second and one second only, when out of nowhere, one of his neighbors, Joe, calls out. 

                  “Howdy, Jared.” Joe walked out onto his front porch and waved. He wore a Hawaiian shirt and bathing suit shorts, all on top of his flip-flops. He had wet hair from lounging in the pool with a beer in hand.

                  Jared looked to the ground and marched forward, ignoring him, and entered into his house. The man had no sense of meaning, no ounce of fight in him.

                  Two weeks went by with Jared finding something to do, even though there was nothing to do. He trimmed his bushes and complained about the pothole in the road in front of his driveway. He swore at the TV as the Bears lost another game and turned that anger into an anxiety about the speck of dirt on his window, cleaning all the windows till they were squeaky clean. 

                  Then he fell to the ground, a pain in his chest and a tightness in his shoulder. He grabbed at his chest, trying to reach inside to jumpstart his heart, but it was being overworked. 

The doctor said he had to find a way to calm down, a way to relax. Jared sneered at the doctor but knew he was right. That is how Jared found himself in a yoga class in the mall. He sat in the back trying to lay down his mat that stuck together and wouldn’t roll out. He tried again but this time it flew from his hands and landed on the women in front of him as she sat down, breathing. 

“Sorry.”

He took the mat, and this time was able to lay it on the ground and saw that everybody was doing some move called downward dog. He placed his hands on the ground, annoyed at the sticky mat, picking up every substance on the ground as he tried to ignore it. He pushed his butt up into the air, feeling the stretch in his legs and felt amazing for one second. Then, his arms wobbled, and he fell over face first onto the mat. He tasted dirt and gun powder as the mat turned into a dirt road. He wind blew into his face and smoke burned beyond but just as soon as it came the memory faltered. Hair from the mat stuck to his face as he looked up and saw everybody staring at him. What a waste of time. He thought.

He chuckled, got up, and left. How the hell is that supposed to be relaxing? He thought. On the way out, he could feel a draft going down his legs and felt around confused at where the cold breeze was coming from. He stopped and paused. He ripped his pants. Straight down the middle from front to back, he ripped his pants. Relaxing my ass.

The next day, Jared walked down the sidewalk, watching the same fools sunbathing and drinking their spritz. He couldn’t even look anymore; it made him sick to think about. What’s even worse is his wife bought a hammock to lie on, like it would cure all her problems. She was being infected by this town’s ways. 

When he got home, ignoring Joe once again, he sat down on his couch, trying another way to relax. Reading. Reading could be fun, right? He grabbed a random book off his shelf called The Call of Cthulhu by H. P. Lovecraft. He sits down to read and enjoys it… For about one minute until he had to look up words every ten seconds to figure out what they meant. What in the world is a diabolist? His eyes started to droop, as he couldn’t figure out what the last paragraph he read meant. Then his eyes shot open as he stood up. He ran over to the kitchen sink and started to do dishes. 

“Damn things are always piled high.”

He looked up and saw a picture of him hanging on the wall. It was him as a marine in the Afghanistan war, smiling before he was sent off for deployment. He never knew what the world had in store for him. The constant pain of not knowing, waiting for orders to move or a bullet to fly by his head and force him to act. He knew it was what changed him. Made him the way he is, always needing to do something, and knowing the pain and suffering he went through for people to just sit on their hammocks all day.  

He turned from the photo and focused on the dishes. 

The next day, he sat outside plucking weeds from his back patio when he saw a rabbit running around his backyard, heading towards his garden. 

“Hey, no! Get away!”

He stood up. His knees cracking with age and jogged towards the rabbit. The rabbit's ears perked up and stood frozen.

“Get! Shoo!”

Jared ran to the rabbit but tripped on a stick as a shooting pain went up his leg. The rabbit hopped away, and he hobbled on his good leg over towards the only spot to sit. The hammock. The sun shone down on it as if it was a spotlight showing Jared where to go. 

He fell into the hammock and rubbed his ankle. He hated sitting on the hammock; it made him shiver with disgust, but it was an emergency. He put the foot up onto the hammock and lied down, feeling the sun's warmth. His foot ached, but already felt a little bit better. 

His eyelids became heavy and closed as the sun shone onto his face, the orange glow of it making his vision all sorts of different colors. He felt his body sink into the fabric below him. He could hear the children next door jumping into the pool, having fun, Joe screaming at them to cannonball. He felt the wind on his face and smelt the flowers from his garden. He could feel the world slowly fading into nothing as he was one with the sun and his hammock. The warmth, his friend, helped him relax and calm. 

There was no gunshots, no smoke, no screaming of pain or the taste of blood. He was just in his own world of relaxation. The war left his mind. The pain and suffering was gone if just for a moment. A moment was all he asked for. 

He finally did it. He could get used to this. Now all he needed was an aperol spritz.