SURVIVAL, MEMORY, AND THE PRICE OF ENDURANCE
The past slipped through our fingers like dust in a desert storm. It was no longer a place we could return to, not even in memory, for memory had been scorched from us, burned away by the white heat of duty, and the terrible glare of necessity. The future loomed like an ominous shadow, offering no promise, only more of the same: the assignment, the hunt, the kill. What little remained to us was the narrow edge of the present, razor-thin and trembling, stretched between blood and breath and every step forward into the chaos of the war.
We lived by instinct, ritual, and the cold arithmetic of survival. Nothing else mattered. Not the old words, old songs, the homes we left behind, and the names of those we once loved. To pursue, to capture, to complete became the solitary daily rhythm. It represented the only music left to us in the silence following ruin.
Over time, the grotesque became familiar. Horror no longer startled. Death ceased to surprise, and we had become creatures of reflex and necessity, honed, hardened, and unfeeling. The cries of the dying, once sharp, dulled, and the shock of blood on the hands faded to something like dust on skin.
And yet, even after decades turned to ash, some moments involuntarily returned. There were nights when the old faces rose again in sleep, a cry from long ago cracked through the silence of years. And in that instant, time folded back on itself, and we were there again.
Over fifty years passed, but the mind refused to surrender what it could not understand. The worst of it still lived in us. God only knows we wanted peace. But the war did not end in silence. I know now it will echo until I transition into eternity.
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