In the last moments I remembered the time when I was a child. In the last moments it all came back. Promises I never kept, hopes I lost, and dreams I deserted. I realized, before the peril came, that there was nothing good that could come from the last moment. I wanted to stop and turn back but there wasn’t enough fuel in the engine. Besides, they would have killed me. I wanted to jump out but I would have died just the same. They didn’t give us parachutes. It’s not like they expected us to survive. In fact, they knew, hoped, that we wouldn’t. We were supposed to be heroes. The buddies of mine never knew that I felt like that; they thought I was just as intent on being a hero as they were, but the truth is I was just afraid of being infamous. My mother was proud of me, and I guess that’s why I chose to go through with it. I should have stayed at home when they asked for me. I should have taken a job. I should have taken on a skill, but I had to take my mother’s advice and be a hero. Some mother… sends her son off to die.
There was a time, I remember, when I was young that there was a girl I always found looking at me. Maybe it’s because I was always looking at her, but it doesn’t matter. She watched me fly off from her house, shaking her head in disgust. Why didn’t I take her advice? I could have had such a happy life. But the crowds shielded me from her, they stole my heart and turned it to stone. I didn’t deserve her for my cowardice. Not my fear of dying, they drive that straight out of you, but the fear of being feared. I was afraid of what might happen if I disappointed my mother, but she didn’t ever care. Not about me. She wanted her son to be a pilot. She wanted her son to be a hero. She wanted her son to take his own life trying to defeat the enemy.
But the thing is, the enemy doesn’t send suicide bombers on us. They don’t hurt us at all. In fact, they think we’re friends. Friends don’t kill friends. But that’s not what I’m supposed to think at all. I’m supposed to think that they are the cruel center of the universe, that my death will somehow matter in the grand scheme of things, that when I died it would take down the enemy that deserved to die.