Cheating Death

Can you feel the wind on your face?
Can you feel the soft dry breeze blowing on your face, the hot air flowing through your cheeks? You should keep your eyes semi-closed to prevent the thin desert sand from entering your retina and forever ruin you accurate visual perception.
You may never be a shooter for the army.
Maybe that’s the whole point.
The thought of what you’ve left behind crosses your mind for a few seconds, then comes a smile.
Sometimes I wondered how beautiful can things get. They can’t get much more beautiful than this.
Have you ever been to the desert?
It doesn’t get more beautiful than this.
Yesterday I left home, I needed a break, some time off you know? Don’t we all?
I also needed not to get caught by the military police. This was my second problem: war.
She wants me there, I don’t want to be anywhere near her.
I can’t figure what it would be like to be trapped in the desert with a machine-gun in my hand, not knowing where I am, what I’m doing, where I’m going.
Neither of us would.
New recruits are always pawns in a war, sacrifice.
Can you transpose yourself to this reality?
Bombed cities, gun shots every minute, screams, dodging bullets, evading bombs, cheating death…
I can’t, and I won’t.

This is why I’m in this car. That’s why all of us are here, with the upcoming war we were all called to serve the mother land… Yeah, like the mother land ever did anything for us.
This is not our war, why should we fight it?
Today, throughout the desert you can see an as-long-as-you-can-imagine caravan of cars. We are all literally and metaphorically on the same road. Ridding whatever gas powered vehicle you could find to evade a war about gas.
By the way, here in the backseat to my left is Kate, in the front, on the wheel is Coop and leaning on his shoulder is Andrea. Us four go way back.

Welcome in.
As you can see we aren’t very happy, despite the incredible sense of freedom.
We left everything, I mean absolutely everything.
You have a desperate feeling of survival when your friend enters through your house breathless saying you’ve got to leave town.
"They are after you!" After everyone.
At this point your brain presses “auto-pilot”, you just shovel whatever comes to your attention as necessary into your backpack and close the door on your way out.
Survival mode.
Your mental timing of you exiting town is no more than 10 seconds.
When conscience comes to you, you are already 100 miles away from your life.
Life as you knew it just ended.
This is hitting the “pause” button in our lives (at least our legal lives) for who knows how long.
We stop existing.

We plan to survive doing whatever we can do. Sara has brilliant ideas, Coop knows mechanics and Kate knows absolutely everything about everything (kind of a walking encyclopaedia).
Me? Well, I’m good at planting stuff. Geology and botany are my specialties so I can tell what you can and can’t do with a piece of land.
Useful stuff to survive.
What about you? Get a hat and put in on the ground, don’t worry, we’ll teach you to juggle…
You’ll make it.

By the end of the second day of our journey we started to get our status report on the radio.
“The refugee caravan is now 3miles long and heading towards east…”
It was also heard that they were starting to hunt us down like dogs. From what I’ve heard some have already been caught.
Forced into the army.

Is this thinkable? Hurt you until you agree to hurt others?
Some mother land.
Coop hit’s the gas harder.
“Those sun’sa bitches will never catch us!”
Do you know what a B-1B Lancer is? You’d know if you heard the deafening sound of one. Well, just imagine looking back to a loud noise a see a fleet of military aircrafts in one of those fancy triangle formations heading towards yourself, ready to drop fifty bombs on your head.
All of this for war.
Presidents love war.
(Why don’t presidents fight the war?)
This is why I’m in the desert with a machine-gun in my hand, not knowing where I am, what I’m doing, where I’m going.

Can you feel the wind on your face?
I keep my eyes wide open.