“Get Over It” - a poem

By John Ribner: “Get over it,” they demand.
But I’m the one who got hit in the drive-by, man! So excuse me if I can’t just wake up and say bye-bye to everything that happened. My blood stained the sidewalk for a week, one week, yet they act like this is just something I just imagined.

Back in ’88 I was consumed with hate because someone blasted me in the back. Was he on crack? I didn’t know him or his reasons. Maybe it was white boy season when the bullet slammed into my shoulder and punched through my chest. I must confess, I didn’t possess a bullet-proof vest, so rush me to the hospital to get this wound dressed. Hey Doc! Why you running thosee tests? To see if I’m on drugs? Oh. So I’m just another thug in a deal gone bad. That’s sad, because it wasn’t anything of the kind. I was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.
“But that was 26 years ago,” they whine.
Fine! So just forget that someone tried to assassinate me. No need to calculate how much blood I spilled or that they gunned me down just for thrills; no, I should look past all these ills and just get over it. Ignore the nightmares that still come around, when I jump up in bed every time I hear that sound … Pop! More like a firecracker than a .22 round, but firecrackers don’t knock you to the ground. Yeah. I should get over it.

Instead, I hold on to my pain while Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder plays its nasty game of molding me into a monster I couldn’t hide. Within no one to confide in, I became more terrifying than Godzilla, who crushed toy-box Tokyos where no one got hurt. But the monster inside me, now he really did the dirt … pushing away friends, making sure my relationship came to an end. There wasn’t a bed big enough to hold her, me and my hate. And still they thought “get over it” would motivate.
But it didn’t.
Not until I’d finally had enough … of this anger, frustration and a half-life made rough by 2.6 grams of lead. I might be messed up but I wasn’t dead, so I said, “Maybe it’s time to find me, time to reach deep down inside me.” Because somewhere beyond the darkest parts that defined me, was the desire to somehow, some way, just get over it.