Musings on War

Nobody leaves a war unscathed – both literally and metaphorically. We all try to move on with our lives. We try to bury it as if it never happened. We hold onto the good things in life and have gratitude that it’s “not as bad as it once was”. But that energy looms around us all the time, haunting us. 

I’ve had to grieve my birthplace, my hometown, my people, my loved ones, and myself, my entire life.  I have grieved thousands of versions of my parents, my brother, myself. Because the simple truth is - none of us remained the same after that. We tried to put on our most brave and strong faces. We tried to find happiness after escaping all the rubble and destruction. 

But there was no way to escape the darkness that comes along with war. It stayed with us, showing up in our eyes, our smiles. It seeped into the way we drink our coffee and the way we sleep – or don’t sleep. We pass it onto our children, and they pass it unto theirs – unless we do our damn hardest to break the patterns. And that in itself, is a whole other journey. A journey of uncovering all the defense mechanisms we placed upon ourselves in order to survive. It is a journey of grief, sorrow, longing, regret, and loss – so much loss.  

Not a journey that  just anyone would take, but some of us are somehow pushed into it, more than others. Some of us are called onto that journey, in an attempt to transmute that darkness, so it not only stops haunting us, but stops haunting our families, our people, our home. And in the end – doesn’t pass down onto our children and their children, so they have a chance to do better, even if we didn’t.  One of my regrets in life may very well be never pulling the metaphorical trigger, not the literal one. Even though I have seen thousands upon thousands pull the literal one in my life. My regret will probably be not sharing my truth, not voicing it as much as I “should” have. But it is a hard truth to voice.  

To voice the suffering of tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of lives, of souls, feels like an immense responsibility. How could I ever do justice to that kind of suffering, that kind of destruction and pain? How could I even attempt to give a voice to those who lost their lives, whose families still search for them when bodies are uncovered underneath layers and layers of soil? Who am I to speak for them? In the end, I can’t. I can only speak my own story, and have to remind both myself and everyone else that even that is just one tiny perspective. 

It is just one tiny piece of the puzzle, of the full story. There are tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of people will similar stories to mine, or with stories that complete mine. Mine is just a tiny fraction of that – but still a fraction. And in this current time, with everything going on in the world, I feel it’s more important than ever to speak up about it, share my story, and reach out.