I put together a rifle with my own hands and nickels and me and that rifle can chew the itty-bitty middles out of your standard paper plate at 500 yards all day.
I've made phone calls that delete terrain features. I've run a stock pickup truck up and down trails that eat, with predictable regularity, purpose built side-by-sides. I wore the most expensive and complicated endo-atmospheric machine ever built like it was spine-fused power armor and cast thunderbolts down onto helpless armies.
Not a single god damned bit of it matters.
I've spent my whole life figuring it out the hard way, picking shit up off the floor with my fingerbones that vexed the stiffest pinch bars and hydraulic hoists, and kept it in the air with bubblegum and tinfoil. I've been an Airman and a consultant and a mercenary with eye-watering daily rates. I've turned my nose up at custom G wagons and been escorted through the backrooms of international airports and somewhere there's a picture of me, butt naked and still wet from the tub, tilted crazily on the floor of a Ukrainian hotel after military curfew, drunk off my ass and tossing around piles of Euros and dollars and Zloty like Mardi Gras beads off the illest krewe's masterpiece float.
And not a bit of it made me feel like I knew what I was doing when that was what I needed.
When my dog was still a little velociraptor and I was living in the rotten nucleus of the hood, I used to take him out to the old brownfield where the factories were long torn down and the rails had been silent for decades, because it was the only place we could go for him to R U N. Big circles, figure 8s with me at the center, him divebombing me close enough that I felt his wake in my leg hairs, laughing and barking and gimballing in the sun. We were pinballs together, a multiball play on the gleaming field, pow pow pow on the markers and bumpers and a quick eye on the flappers bouncing us ever upwards, scoreboard reading 0 PLAYS and the big row of numbers nearby freewheeling like a slot machine despite it.
Banjo was a ride or die. Banjo was my everything when I was nothing. Banjo saved my life and I had to hold him close, spooned out on the floor of the X-ray room with his bed and his blanket. I had to whisper to him that it was okay to sleep, that I would see him tomorrow, and I laid there and felt him relax as the tranquilizer helped him go down past the pain of the cancer all over in his guts, the swollen fluid pinching off his digestion, the arched back and stiff legs of pain that left him reeling around like a drunk giraffe when he could even manage to stand. I felt him hitch against me, twice, the death rattle, the veterinarian kneeling beside us with a stethoscope telling me shortly thereafter that she could not detect a heartbeat.
I laid with him for five more minutes, shushing and petting and telling him everything he needed to know to rest properly, in case he was still in there.
I had to kill him before he could have just one more good day, because there weren't any left.
When I got home I poured him out a whole cold one and sat in the sun until it started to cook me, because he never got his last good afternoon in the sun. It's not time yet to shave my head and send up the offerings, but it will be soon enough. I believe in a mechanistic universe and I know when I got up off the floor, there wasn't a Banjo in there anymore, it was just an old set of clothes that had been shed at the end of a journey. I looked at the pile of old clothes on purpose, before I left them there. It was important to me to see them there, to acknowledge what they were in the moment, and to be sure it was what I really believed, before I turned around and walked away from them. But before I did, I still told him he was a good boy and that I would be home soon, his keywords for me leaving for a while, and I told him I missed him already, and I meant it, and I mean it.
Here I am weeks later, still wound so tight inside, trying to get along with all of the chores and tasks piled up, the interior renovations and moving my workshop and pecking away with the last of the good weather at my own little terrorist compound in the mountains, dealing with a new medically prescribed diet, recognizing every single day that I have that little extra time to take care of stupid shit that I used to spend taking care of Banjo.
He got me through the darkest parts of my life and the hardest changes. He saw me to somewhere safe beyond the treacherous slog over the Hindu Kush, to the base of some new, friendlier mountain not alive with so many enemies and then he curled right up at the trailhead, because he couldn't go any farther.
And sometimes when the rucksack gets uncomfortable or I stop for a breather, I want so badly to just hug him and put my face in his fur, to check in with him the way I always have, to know he's there the way he always was, just the way I needed him to be, and I want it so badly that it feels like I'm going to explode like a barrel of ANFO buried in a ditch with an old RPG fuze stuffed inside. I feel the pressure in my whole body, a scream stuck in my throat and sometimes not, frozen at that nanosecond before the barrel ruptures and tosses the road up, heedless of maybe gleeful for the 20-ton MRAP as it tumbles away like a bean can full of traumatic brain injury and shattered limbs.
I trained him to ring a little bouquet of jinglebells hung on the doorknob, to let me know when he wanted out. They'd been set aside on a windowsill near the door, to make way for renovations, and a week after I came home without him I accidentally knocked them down and the sound they made when they hit the floor stopped my heart.
I've been finding his stuff, a piece at a time, and it's taking time to move it and pack it away and dispose of it. Some things I don't have the strength to move, yet. Some things will go into my grave with me - his ashes and his collar and his jinglebells - because if my tomb is ever of note, if anyone ever takes notice of what I leave behind, if by some cosmic chance my high score is recognized after my pinball slips down the gutter, I want them to know about Banjo.