Imagine.

Sometimes I think there’s a war going on in my backyard, just beyond the woods. I hear the rat-a-tat-tat of sub machine guns, a helicopter making a pass, and the occasional shout of orders. The thought of an insurrection war briefly passes through my mind, where thousands of normal citizens suddenly begin trying to take over places of power or just killing random citizens – kinda like Red Dawn, but from the inside.

It scares me. I consider running inside and locking myself and my sister in our basement. I want to call my parents and my other sister to make sure that they know to stay somewhere safe rather than come home to a war zone. I just about grab the remote to see if the media is on to this start up war on our home soil but another scary thought grabs me.

What if the media are in on it? What if the battles escape the news’ attention? No one would know that there are dead bodies piling up across the woods as a father desperately tries to defend his home and family from soldiers that would have them dead.

What if the cavalry didn’t know to come in? What if there was no cavalry? What if we were left to be citizen-soldiers? Could I do it? Could you?

I wonder if this is what the citizens of Iraq feel like every day. They don’t know if the rat-a-tat-tat is some kind of construction equipment or a machine gun. That big boom could be a demolition of an old house or a suicide bomber in the middle of the market. They don’t know until they run toward the sound, fearing the worst.

I stay in my backyard recliner. The noises keep going, but I don’t investigate. I don’t get up to turn on the TV, I don’t check online. I sit here, wondering if war is going on just beyond my woods and do nothing. I tell myself that it’s just an overactive imagination. Earlier, I saw a plane come out of nowhere accompanied by a strange sound and immediately thought that it must have been displaced here from the Bermuda Triangle in the 60s. Those sounds you hear are just construction. Real guns would be louder. A real battle wouldn’t take this long. If something really bad was happening, somehow, you would find out.

But the noises keep going. And I can’t think of any construction equipment that sounds like that. In the end, I’m not sure what keeps me to this chair – the tea, the laptop, the fear that my overactive imagination is right, or the fear that my overactive imagination is wrong?