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The beginning of The Yellow Birds by Kevin Powers speaks on the flowers and trees and birds existing in Baghdad prior to American involvement in that sand-burdened city—that before the war, hyacinths grew plentiful, their bulbous towers the consecrated beauty of unperturbed nature. That only soft-vegetative enchantment had graced the banks of the Tigris or the Euphrates until the moment Americans blew across the border in diesel-fueled fumes. That blue- and white-petaled beauty had been replaced by the Bush-appellated “Shock and Awe” campaign of faux-patriotic fireworks. The first time I read these lines, I thought—the audacity.

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After all, a hard truth exists in what we all know. Baghdad did not need to be bombed, or Iraq invaded, or 208,831 Iraqi civilians murdered (as of June 16th, 2021). These numbers represent Powers’ disappeared hyacinths—the victims of a military-industrial complex gone rogue and an imperialist attitude set in the belief that its culture must be forced on non-white civilizations if this world is to be saved. The criminal factors involved in the war have been long debated in the varied allied countries dragged along by Bush-era lies. The death and destruction of an illegal war has attempted to erase from existence an ancient culture. This uncomfortable and unavoidable reality provides the root of Powers’ metaphor, one I now acknowledge as important and brilliant.

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My true frustration lies not with what the metaphor says but with the meaning it begs for. Hyacinths do not simply disappear from our world once trampled by uranium-depleted monsters. Nature tends to survive, hell-bent on reclaiming what has been taken from it by humankind. And this metaphor forgets this—in spite of the tenacity and bravery of Iraqis in reclaiming their land. The hyacinth holds far more meaning than a brief line in a celebrated novel can account for.

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The wonderful thing about rushing through an undergrad degree in English was the way in which different content and coursework bumps and collides into one another like atoms forming new molecules at a swinger party deep in the subconscious. Each idea informs the others as a complex latticework forms with space between the strands for other ideas to grow in to. I’d begun this latticework by forcing my mind into a tabula rasa, starting the process of knowledge formation with an acknowledgement that each belief from my former life was one that resulted only in death, destruction, and alcoholism.

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One of my fondest recollections from this time exists in the form of a children’s book—Love You Forever by Robert Munsch and Sheila McGraw. During those early years in College Station, I could see feel the pain in her heart, though I could not yet quantify the emotions involved. I’d just begun to read as intensely as my mother, discovering the escape it afforded me while waiting for my father to get home. Every afternoon, I would crawl behind the recliner in the living room, open this book, and read those lines over and over again:

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In a few of my classes, I read Ovid’s Metamorphoses. The Roman retelling of Greek myth (itself an erasure of sorts) informs much of medieval literature and (because old white men have designated what matters in education) serves as a key work in the Western canon. Ovid’s flowery prose stirs the emotional imagination and confronts us with the magic of transformation and transfiguration. Humans are built to consider the meaning of change, and Ovid confronts us with a magical variation on which to ruminate.

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At the time, I’d been working on my undergrad thesis, a study in how much trauma I could relive in the white space of a page while taking eighteen hours a semester. I could only read and form initial responses to my assigned reading—to do anything else would be to slide even further into the shared pitchers of Ziegenbock during our collegiate veteran meetings. So, at the time, I only scoffed at the idea of hyacinths thriving in Iraq.

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My mother read voraciously—harlequin romances, cheap adventure novels, anything that could lift her up from the rumble of the railroad tracks that ran through the center of town. After giving birth to me in a small hospital, she’d take me with her to class. I’ve seen pictures from her senior yearbook of myself riding on her classmates’ shoulders through sepia hallways filled with mustachioed basketball players in short gym trunks and teenagers with oversized frames for glasses. For her, motherhood began early.

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I’ve come to understand the hyacinth metaphor as extending beyond death. If hyacinth is memory, then it extends in its influence well beyond grave markers and newspaper obituaries. Hyacinth follows me around, tapping on my shoulders, bugging me every time I attempt to make a decision. Memory is trauma which resurfaces every time I want to buy a hot dog, and I’ve built my entire life around memories—few of them pleasant.

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Often, the tiniest bits of inconsequential information became points of obsession—Hemingway’s use of a napkin to make a statement on trauma-centric identity, Homer’s critique of post-traumatic stress in The Odyssey, Toni Morrison’s use of musicality in discussing race relations, Gloria Anzaldúa’s use of a scrying mirror to consider border consciousness. Those minor compulsions which become focal points for essays which explore the critical points in literature. For me, one of these obsessions became the hyacinth.

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The part of Hyacinth’s story that tends to be left out—even by Ovid himself—is that Hyacinth remains ever-present, even if he exists in a different form. The metamorphosis does not erase Hyacinth or even leave him out of sight. In fact, it keeps Hyacinth in view, lying in wait every spring to remind Apollo of the devastating consequences of his actions. Hyacinth bulbs are poisonous, ghostly reminders of Apollos’s role in his servant’s death. While Apollo may associate himself with the lyre or a chariot pulling the sun across the sky, the hyacinth reminds him that he has been an instrument of death. It becomes a symbol of the harm caused by his actions, even if he’d never intended the results.

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I think this is why I obsess over the hyacinth. It is deadly and addictive, a thing of beauty with petals of poison. I feel sucked into its siren-like qualities, only to find myself crashing into the rocks below each time. Fortunately, I’ve come to forgive my mother, forgive myself, understand humans are pushed by the winds of life, circumstance, and trauma into bad decisions that impact ourselves and others. I’ve learned to live side-by-sides with my trauma and my mistakes.

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My earliest recollections of my mother are ones of pure love. She’d given birth to me at 17, the result of a relationship with a football player in a tiny town on the edge of West Texas. My father—a year older than her—would go on to become a firefighter and source of some of my greatest trauma.

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There is one of other piece of the Hyacinth myth I’ve only recently become aware of. Years after his death, Apollo resurrects Hyacinth and carries him up to Mount Olympus to serve his master and lover once more. The annual festivals mourning his death began to include a period of celebration over his rebirth. Apollo no longer lived in anger at himself—he’d found a way to live side-by-side with his Hyacinth.

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During high school, I occasionally found myself homeless after arguments with my mother. Once, I’d left the deep fryer out on the counter too long. Another time, I’d said “shit” when stubbing my toe against the wall. I would live in my car, an old Lincoln Towncar gifted to me by my grandfather (it smelled of drugs and would eventually make the local news by catching fire in the high school parking lot). When I could, I would spend a night or two with a family from a local church. My father refused to be an option—he said I wasn’t welcome at his house.

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In the years following my second deployment—a 12-month stint in Kandahar Desert—I obsessed over ghosts. I couldn’t walk into a grocery store without a phantom face staring back at me before I blinked the clerk back into existence. When I drank, I would dive deep into the memories of dead friends and allies. I felt I should’ve done more, taken their place, or at least have contributed more to the preservation of their memory. I began to chew on metaphorical hyacinth bulbs in the downward momentum that would result in my wife’s departure, the end of a promising military career, and ultimately rock bottom—or, more specifically, a three-month stay in the county jail after a few failed suicide attempts.

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As I began my undergrad thesis, my writing shifted. I entered into another obsession with the second person point-of-view. Everything I wrote only pointed the firm finger of hostility at myself in an attempt to force self-accountability. “You failed to say something to other soldiers as they ridiculed Kalin Johnson before he placed the barrel of his rifle to his forehead. You allowed your marriage to fall apart before your ex-wife took your son to Germany, leaving behind the bucket of baseballs you’d bought for him as a reminder of your failure. You did not stick up for Morrison when she began identifying as a woman in the cold German winter following your return from Iraq. You enlisted in the military and helped perpetuate the very violence you now speak out against. You hypocrite.” It only got worse when I began my MFA and felt the judgment of those who did not have to enlist to escape the nightmarish homelessness I’d endured more than once.

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I spent the summer bouncing between the homes a few people I knew, sleeping in the university library a few nights, and looking for work. I finally got hold of the friend’s dad who gave me a job the summer before and made enough money to live off the McDonald’s dollar menu. By June, I realized college wasn’t place for a 19-year-old with no support. So I stared down the street lined with red, white, and blue flags and enlisted in the Army, where I would find a whole new species of hyacinths to poison and haunt me.