As I Rise || Post-War Drabble
To be a soldier, is to shed a part of yourself. To abandon your hopes, your dreams, your self. To leave it all in a box to open again when you return home, but the chances of returning home are slim. And the chances of finding that box when you come home are even slimmer. It's a truth that at some point we all had to learn, whether we were dying in the combat zone or wishing we had. Wishing the war had taken us while we waste hours on something we pretend is sleep.
I've found that most nights, the stories come out. Whether I want them to or not, there's no way to deny them. The phantoms from thirty years ago, still haunting me like they happened yesterday. Yesterday or never, I can't tell anymore. It's like the words spill out of me as I try to skim across the surface of my history. Sometimes it feels like I'm trying to save my own life with these stories. Maybe if I tell it differently, then things will be different in the here and now.
But once someone is dead, you can't just undo it. Bodies decay and give way to new life. There is no need for last calls or psychopharmacologists. That's for those of us who survived, or at least, for those of us who have been told we survived. There's no way to visit their graves. Half of them don't have one, and the other plots belong to strangers. Only a few names had ever been known in full, some in part, but most were left completely unasked. Except in clearly unreasonable cases, we soldiers were generally called by the names we had been given, or some nickname given to the alias. We made no great effort to disentangle Christian names from nicknames from capitals.
As it is, though, I don't know if it would have changed too much. I know that the weight of seeing it in stone would be too much for my shoulders. The burden of survival already too heavy for me to carry most days. It wasn't until I left the Project that I felt the weight begin to form. To crush me, consume me, become me.
It had been realising that none of us had ever been heroes. That their deaths had been in vain. Knowing that when the bell tolled for me, I would have to lie when I met them once more. To keep this secret close to my heart for all of eternity, so that they might rest easily. Thinking that their sacrifice had been felt. That it had been worth every ounce of pain they had suffered in their final moments. Bodies that had burned, been cut apart, bled out.
Even if I met them again, in some Hell I don't believe in, there are those of which we will never see again. Those who's bodies gather dust in storage containers, minds locked in a state of mindlessness.
When I tell stories, they live. Sometimes when I tell stories, no one dies. Sometimes everyone dies. Sometimes I give myself a new name, and I tell the tale of my demise. On the nights that I'm most lonely, I tell the bartender that some of us are getting together for drinks next week. Even though we aren't, and even though I mention some of them by name. Usually the ones who died first. The ones who still haunt my restless nights with screams of agony, or even worse, the ones who haunt my days with broken laughter. Memories strung together in a disjointed line, even the happiest of thoughts have become nightmares.
When I tell these stories, sometimes I can see them sit up. Stand up and wipe away the blood that stained the wounds that had killed them, walk away from the place where they died. I can see them smile. That is the moment I know that I have to keep telling these stories. I want to save their lives -- not their bodies, just their lives.
Because I survived, but my story doesn't have a happy ending. I end when the weight of their stories swallows me down into imagined quicksand. Where I will emerge from the other end of the world, where they are alive and I am not alone. Where my lover will be waiting, and they will take me in their open arms and pull me close to them before the shore pulls me back into reality. I will call it something close to love, others will call it something more sinister.
But until that day comes, I will keep telling stories. I will tell them to myself at night, I will tell them to the court appointed therapist, I will tell them to the shadows of the trees in the park five miles from my house. The civs think I'm telling war stories. But I don't tell war stories. I've never told war stories.
I tell love stories.