And here's a sartorial suggestion for citygent's next ( night out at the pub... )

Prominent on my list of storytelling pet peeves is the Reasonless Revelation: wherein characters, unbidden or with only the slightest hint of prompting, share highly intimate details about their lives. It’s not credible! No one does that! I have been known to rant.

So today we’re in the airport waiting for our flight home, and a diffident soldier, foot in a cast, approaches. We offer him our seats, but he doesn’t need to sit down. He’d like to use one of our phones to call his wife.

As we fumble in our bags, he talks. It’s been, he guesses, the worst and best week of his life. He just had this surgery, paid for by the U.S. government thank you very much, for the plantar fasciitis that he got when the Army switched to suede boots. Didn’t look like much on the outside, just a little lump on the heel, but you step on a stone or a pecan (he emphasized the first syllable) and it’s so painful.

Yeah, it’d been bad. He’s just been realizing how much the PTSD and depression was affecting him. In fact he had an attempted suicide situation, and he was in a treatment facility for five days and they put him on antidepressants, he can’t believe the difference. He’s really glad we’re going to let him use the phone, it means a lot to make this call to his wife. Well, fiance, actually — they’ve been together five years, they have a three year old. When he had that mental breakdown, well, there was a gun involved, and the sheriff wanted to know if she wanted to press charges for attempted murder and aggravated assault, and she said Hell no! He had to go, though, they were living in a house her parents owned and her parents aren’t really supportive. He wants to get out of the Army. He’s gonna move back in with his parents, find a job doing something calm. Peaceful.

All this in about ten minutes.

Steve locates his phone and hands it over. The call is short, with a lot of I love yous. Then they’re calling us to board. He’s in first class. Gotta use those benefits while he’s got ‘em, he figures.

A short while later, we walk past him on the way to our non-first-class seats. He’s talking to his seatmate, and we can’t help but wonder if he’ll tell the whole story again.

Originally published at sararyan.com. You can comment here or there.

1. Two-faced woman at a party. Photo taken in low light, but she must've turned her head really fast! Let's just call her "Janice."

2. Senator Chris Dodd praying for that 60th vote during last Saturday's health care hearing.