For some of us, the war is unreal, though we live in it. We're untouched by it's fires. We feel it, and again we don't. We don't know if we will survive. We don't even think of survival. Only, in the sudden breaks between bloodshed and laughter, we stop to see how we might have died; we cry - the first time. By the third time, the pain will have sunk into our follicles, so only our hairs will feel it. But now, as we are, even our follicles have grown tired of the pain, so our hairs sit limp, waiting for an inevitable; expecting and not expecting, trifling between twisted fantasies - or the different ways it could die...
We know the war. We were born into it. We didn't see when the first man fell. We probably will not see when the last man will. But we know the war. Is it not its song that wakes us every morning? We know its colours and, it is not only red. It is also white - the colors of angels - and blue - the colour of clear sky.
Rains fall here too. The same ones that fall beyond here; colourless and round, sometimes lightly brushing the air till they kiss us with a false weightlessness; almost as if to say the war was like it - weightless, without load or effort, conveying a dastardly purposelessness. We do not understand the rain, or why it still falls here. Here should be dry, like the souls of those who bring death to us. We hear the rain, in the moments of unspoken dolour, while we sit quietly, its patter as background for our thoughts; the orchestra of wet grief.
Sometimes too it falls, in the vile heat of battle; when the ears no longer shirk at gunshots, and the heart no longer jumps at the boom of grenades. It falls on dirt, aptly making mud and muck that will stick to our feet, and disturb the sleeping odours of the dead. It falls too on the blood clinging to our faces and our guns, and dilutes them to a bright, innocent pink, as the lips of a fair child. But in the midst of the obscure bleakness, we see the lips, contorted in mock glee, laughing, laughing at us madly, hysterically.
Tonight we will sleep again, knowing we will wake tomorrow, half wishing we will not. We will not bother to bathe or scrub our sleeping places or our tents. We will inhale our stale smells and not scrunch our noses in disgust; for this is as it should be, squalor represented in squalor, hate in hate.
For some of us, the war is unreal, though we die in it. We're touched by its fires. We feel it, and again we don't. We don't know how many nights remain. Three, four, thirty, forty....? And they will still come. And we will still be ready; gun in hand, soul out of body, head envisioning circles of blood arising patiently with the sun.
