Belonging To Shadows

Excellence Award in the 'Write As Rain 2014' competition

There once lived a time when I could look another in the eye and still say I was an honest man, that my words were entwined with truth, and that my actions were rooted of noble intention.
There was a time before the tainting of a heart and the remorseless monster that emerged beneath the foggy layers of wars fought and wars lost.
For all wars are lost, entangled in lies speaking of nobility and of pride.
For if I have felt the weight of human life fading away into crimson streaks on my empty hands, do I belong to them anymore?
If I have lived and died but fate refuses my plea to cross over, what am I?
If what I have seen has torn my soul and the thought of mortality has long passed my mind, what am I?
I knew of love, once. And hope. A distant memory that drifts in faraway crevices of lost minds, and I, the seeker, hands flailing as they desperately try to grasp on to the fragments of memory, to the fragments of who I was and bring my life, my identity back again.
Bring me back…
Away from the shadows in which I hide, where the shame and the remorse finally weighs down on me after years of looking away.
Away from the veils of darkness that cascade upon me as the image of what I have done comes alive in my mind.
I can almost hear the bullet fly, and then when it pierces I know that what I have done can never be forgiven, and it is not he who I have doomed, but I.
I know that what we call an enemy is a battalion of people just as naïve…and from their families, from their friends, from their lives and everything they have loved…I have taken away. From whatever smiles may await them on rainy days and memories of cherished moments and the pride of a boy to fight for his country…
The final march of the little boys who have not yet learned to grow up, who have not yet learned to realise that this is all a façade, this is a shadow of what nobility is.
Too late now do I lament upon the lives that have fallen away before me. Too late now do I dare to question what our world is founded on, and the humans- too caught up in conflict to even think of a resolution, too hopeful of triumph that they forget all the things they lose.
There once lived a time when I could look another in the eye and still say I was an honest man, but that time has passed and I am all that remains: an empty shell of something barren of emotion. An empty shell of a mortal life waiting in the shadows, watching flickers skip past on cracked walls- in hope of someday being found and brought into the light.

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