Some of us can remember when all the play of the boys in certain areas involved the phrase, Bang, you’re dead! on loop around fantasies of patrol over living targets, amid the wild promises of ending famine with flying cars. I remember the dizzy vertigo of sensing what I could not express, which might translate loosely into something like, there is too much future here. Sensibilities, such as they were, were overfilled water balloons, ready to be tossed, bang bang, you’re dead, except they were bombs. Wait your turn, said the adults to these boys, and take the bull by the horns, and you don’t know war, for you are soft. The boys couldn’t talk back, and you could hear their resolve, filling each balloon body one at a time. To prove them all wrong, one day.
saudade
with filling fantasies
