Can Beauty Come Out Of Ashes?

They say that every surviving war child has two stories: one from the war, and another from the aftermath. The aftermath. When the gunshots never stop echoing through your head, when every time you lay to go to sleep, images of your family’s death flash before your eyes. When your home is gone, along with everything you ever knew. Was it worth surviving? Did I deserve to survive when millions of others died?

I’m broken. I’m like that one vase you drop that shatters into millions of pieces, so badly that there is no chance of finding every last little piece, let alone repairing it. What do you do with that vase? You throw it away. Something that was once so beautiful and once gave you so much joy, now thrown away never to be seen again, the one you now consider to be such a nuisance because you're always finding pieces of it.

I remember when I discovered that the war was over, hearing the streets full of celebration and happiness, but what were they truly celebrating? The fact that people were not hunting us down like rodents, the fact that millions were treated in such terrible ways? After that I became so depressed that I couldn’t get out of bed, because I felt selfish, selfish for surviving something that should never have happened.

After years of seclusion I finally step outside and inhale loneliness as if it were the smell of rain after a long drought. Everything was back to normal, as if nothing had happened. As if everyone forgot, but I will not forget, because within me, I am a million others.

Despite everything, I will push through. I am the tortured, the deprived, the abandoned, the dead, and despite the fact that I am drowning in the weight of the whole thing, I will make beauty come out of ashes.

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