Emotion du jour: Apathy

So here we are, once again on Fiction Tuesday (which, admittedly, is the same as Fiction Thursday in every way but the name), and I have not much to inspire me. But, never fear, I did get one bright point of inspiration.

In 1998, Story Press published a book by one Ann Hood titled: “Creating Character Emotions.” While I was hoping for a list of adjectives that I could append to speech tags, what the book does instead is give bad and good examples of 36 emotions, arranged by chapters alphabetically. So, on my fiction days, if no specific inspiration is coming (like today), I will delve into this book, pick an emotion, and give you my attempt at conveying it. You will easily recognize these by the one word titles. Today’s, you can see, is apathy. You’ll have to forgive me a little if I cheat on this one, and write something closer to fact than fiction. Apathy is difficult, as Mrs. Hood agrees. Anyway, here goes: I hope you enjoy it.

“What’s it like over there?”

It’s everyone’s favorite question, when I tell them I was in Iraq, ’05 to ’06. I always come up with something: “It was rough, at first, till we moved closer to Baghdad.” Or: “I was on the radio for most of my tour, so it was actually kind of boring.” Or: “It was....interesting.” I like that last one: it lets them fill in their own minds what “interesting” might imply.

What I can’t seem to tell them is the truth: it was like being here – hotter, and sandier, but it was like being here. What about bad guys? What about bombs? What about them? It’s not like you think about that all the time, you’d go nuts. Yeah, we had two trucks go up, lost five guys – and we still drove around after that. We had to. And I’m supposed to, every foot we roll, worry about something going off under me?

It hurt, losing those guys. I went to a football game with one of them, just before we left – had dinner out with four of them at another time, too. I knew some of them from when I came in. And yeah, I thought I was going to be killed – I worried about it until we went back out. But like I said, you can’t function with that worry. So you bury it. You do what you’re supposed to, whatever they tell you. You take what comes – they’d been drilling that into us, whether we realized it or not, for months. They’d been preparing us to die from day one – or to take death without worrying about it too much. We had a job to do, whether we died doing it or not.

I had started writing further, and realized what I was writing was not apathy, but just a healthy view of the temporariness of life. Which is a good pitfall to avoid, I would say – at least, when you’re striving for pure emotion. Or, non-emotion in this case. As Mrs. Hood explains, apathy – like all other emotions – shouldn’t happen in a vacuum, they should each be part of a spectrum of emotions. But the point here was to only convey apathy. You can judge whether or not I succeeded.

See you tomorrow.