Of Love And Loss

• Kiana Jones , Grade 11
• Short Story
• 2011

There are tests in love and war which over see every aspect and defining moment in one’s life.
In Germany during the war, bombs were dropped and millions died. Lovers lay intertwined miles below carnage, or in the middle of pitted, smouldering cobble streets, dying together. Gasping and trading last breaths. Lovers and strangers died together, either slowly, or over a significant amount of paralysed time; maybe holding hands; or exchanging names; or in silence, or weeping over the sound of the dead. There’s a certain sadness that’s derived from the deaths and discoveries of two people who knew a lot, or perhaps not a single piece of significant information about one another, except maybe a name and a hometown. Just a destination merely on the back of a postcard to send to a son, a daughter, or a delayed arrival of a love letter for a widower for those generous, last moments; not a home.
And what becomes of a home which once belonged to those who have died? Will it still be theirs, or is it someone else’s burden to carry, or is it a grief that their loved ones are to devote themselves to? A house, a home, a memoir, will become a shrine, or a meeting place of mourning, or become vacant. For many, many years until the love is finally sighed out from the wood work and the hinges of the windowpanes, and the sadness turns the locks and lets the sun reach musty rooms, old rooms, and new tenants.
Then after many years; after the house has been restored and the garden has been made to thrive off of the Earth; when the nuclear waste is removed from the city centre; when the cobble streets are replaced with asphalt, then and only then, will the deaths of two lovers, or strangers become common history. Pictures and not real people; just bones in graves. Fragments of war and love, desperation and sadness.
During the war how many lovers and strangers became history, or just bones in the ground? I think about this every day. I wonder how many families lost their sons and daughters, mothers and fathers. I think about those who had loved them from a distance, without the courage to step forward and speak their heart; do they now mourn for the loss? Or is their love at a different level? Severe, definite and passionate?
I feel as though I am at a loss myself, though. I feel as though I have lost a significant piece of myself when I realise these things, that these lovers had died like this, or that there is pain and mourning that are pressed deeper than a few mere generations.
I feel as though this war was for nothing, and that we had all lost in the end.