SOUVENIR OF WAR
"Is hell enough the appropriate surrogate for my home?" the question I asked myself after the launch of the first airstrike.
That evening was with a suspicious feeling. We had finished our dinner of crumbled bread and were perching against the wall when it began. The sound humming above the rooftops was a paradox of expression - sonorous to the ears, and yet petrifying the heart.
"We leave before the dawn of tomorrow breaks!" father blared into my ears, and I nodded doggedly despite my conflicting thought of if running was actually the last resort. People would tag us cowards, snitch, and indict us, but I guessed that wouldn't matter. We'd already lost everything. Father had lost his wife, and I had lost a sister and my teen years. What more could the world say that would haunt our sanities? After all, a warrior flees to fight another day.
For a decade, father and I had been surviving amid the seething sound of bombs and bullets, bodies pilled up on the pyre of homes - burning, and puffing the veils of smokes to God in heaven. I clutched my backpack closely to my chest, singing the usual rhymes that lull me to sleep while we take cover shimmying between poles on walls. Then, in a transient, silence broke, I saw shimmering lights, and arms opening for embrace. I blinked my eyes to reality only to see blood oozed from my jugular.
"Fath...er" I gagged, and he turned only to watch how life forced its way out of his son's body. He groaned, and I could hear his voice as it journeyed me away from the world.
"If there's a place called home, and a feeling called peace... For they're broken realities that only in heaven can they be attained." Father had completed my story in my narrative, and titled it Souvenir of War, while I watched him in peace from home - the heaven, the only place where I won't wake up to a red dawn consequence of the bloodletting of the night before.
The End.
That evening was with a suspicious feeling. We had finished our dinner of crumbled bread and were perching against the wall when it began. The sound humming above the rooftops was a paradox of expression - sonorous to the ears, and yet petrifying the heart.
"We leave before the dawn of tomorrow breaks!" father blared into my ears, and I nodded doggedly despite my conflicting thought of if running was actually the last resort. People would tag us cowards, snitch, and indict us, but I guessed that wouldn't matter. We'd already lost everything. Father had lost his wife, and I had lost a sister and my teen years. What more could the world say that would haunt our sanities? After all, a warrior flees to fight another day.
For a decade, father and I had been surviving amid the seething sound of bombs and bullets, bodies pilled up on the pyre of homes - burning, and puffing the veils of smokes to God in heaven. I clutched my backpack closely to my chest, singing the usual rhymes that lull me to sleep while we take cover shimmying between poles on walls. Then, in a transient, silence broke, I saw shimmering lights, and arms opening for embrace. I blinked my eyes to reality only to see blood oozed from my jugular.
"Fath...er" I gagged, and he turned only to watch how life forced its way out of his son's body. He groaned, and I could hear his voice as it journeyed me away from the world.
"If there's a place called home, and a feeling called peace... For they're broken realities that only in heaven can they be attained." Father had completed my story in my narrative, and titled it Souvenir of War, while I watched him in peace from home - the heaven, the only place where I won't wake up to a red dawn consequence of the bloodletting of the night before.
The End.
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