He Raises The Gun Analysis

He raises the gun.

Maybe he does it out of anger, or a sick twisted passion but then again, maybe not. After all, he hasn’t felt anything – not passion, or anger, in a very long time. Nothing, that is, except for the numbness of pain. It could be that he is cursed in the life he’s been given. Or perhaps, it is because he is damned for his choices and by his actions. Possibly, it is because he is an unlimited package of flesh too soft for the hardness of this life. He is a spectrum of bruises coalesced (the only wholeness he has ever felt), a railway map of scars stitched together into a being that is half-formed. His mind battles with itself in a rhythm of endless constancy. It fuels the beating of his heart and drums out a steady war song to a tune that demands blood and suffering;

He is nothing.

He is nothing. He raises the gun because he likes the weight of it in his hand. It is heavy, but not enough to feel like a burden -- not yet at least. The plastic is smooth and soft in a way he has never known softness. He holds it because it is something concrete. It grounds him and carries with it the potential for permanent consequences in his otherwise impermanent world. He is a shadow. He is a drifter, and the gun is his tether to remind himself that he is also real.

Is he real? Most simply, it is because the gun makes him feel powerful and he likes the sensation of power. The rush it brings in its wake and how for a fraction of a second, he is consumed by it. It fills him up so completely that even the fragmented shards of his past no longer look like the shattered promises he knows them to be. Then again, maybe it is because his father locked him away and when he escaped, he left pieces of himself, vital pieces, in that small, dark hovel of a house (never home). Left them behind to be slowly crushed by the weight of imprisonment and to be ultimately forgotten. Although, it could just be that he has always been lacking that ‘something