They should have known better. History had, in their lifetimes, taught them what happens when those that can see turn their backs and those who should act bury their heads in the sand. So too the tragedy of leaders choosing to follow. They didn’t need to flick through channels spell bound by tricks of shadow and light or pay at box offices to gawk at flicks of peace and retribution. No need to flip though pages in volumes. They only had to look around to see them and theirs with limbs missing and bodies burnt. The sound of bombs, AK’s, mothers screaming and fathers wailing still hung heavy in the wind. No more than forty winks away. Tears still fell with the rain. But they grew blind and deaf.
We should have known better. Without the burden of a past tainted by guilt and blood we’d grown up in a different place. Learned a different way of being, not bought by blood and tears: To see ourselves in the eyes of those we met, hear our voices in the words of those we spoke to, feel their own hearts beat in the chests of those who embraced us. And our skin on the faces of those we touched. The god in us simply recognized and reached out to the god in those around us. You held hands with whomever your heart chose. Walked shoulder to shoulder with those you deemed worthy. Sat at tables with those you saw enough of yourself to feel comfortable with. Your heart chose that your heart chose. We reveled in our differences and realized they made us who we were. We were rising from the ashes to stand tall as we did in the stories of olden. We- those who’d walked and passed, those who stood and those who would walk- had spent too long too lost in the dark. But we were dreaming ourselves to the light. Becoming the light.

Little by little, we forgot. Forgot the scab from the scars from the wounds. Chose to forget the ghosts of the demons we’d cleansed with the blood of countless men, women and children. It slipped our memory that our difference defined us. Children in sandboxes chose whose faces they threw sand in because ‘they were not one of us’. Gangs of ‘our’ youths formed to do battle with ‘their’ youths. Love became too afraid to cross a line we didn’t even realize we’d drawn in the sand. Uncles, aunties and friends were relegated to strangers across the line. We came to know theirs had died before they did. Marriages crumbled, children returned home with bruises and young men turned up in morgues and emergency rooms.

“We are the educated ones.” The voices in the waves told us. “You know nothing and what you think you know is wrong. Believe.” We believed. “Open your eyes you’ve been sleeping. We, in our infinite wisdom are, giving you truth. The destiny of cleansing the nation has fallen on your shoulders. Rise up and walk!!!”

We rose. Unable to tell darkness from the light we held their hands and let them lead us to their definition of light. Walked in their shadows and were content with having their backs as all there was to see in life. Let them see the world and tell us what it was. That the ‘vermin’ had watched their children while worked was immaterial. That we had been at the births of their children did not matter. That they had been our first kisses was no more than nightmares from a restless slumber. They needed to die.

You asked me why I stayed when I could have left, at the latest, in the middle of it all. Can’t remember what answers I gave. All lies. I did not run from the war. I was safe among the bloodied and bloodying. What blood was on my hands would be washed away because my conscience was clear. God’s work. We spared and took lives. Broke and built souls. It was a righteous and necessary duty for which I required no payment besides knowing that I had played my part with honour and passion.

Then it all ended. We washed the blood to return home. I had walked among gods as an equal and had burnt, hacked, tortured and murdered anything in me that had any place among the living. There was no me to return home. Still, I walked in the streets that had raised me. Woke up to the same sun. Recognised faces and places. But every time I looked around I was nowhere to be found. The boy had given birth to something else. Nothing but shallow graves remained of those whose faces he’d held onto hoping to see them when all the guns had fallen silent. There was a form that talked and walked like me, sometimes even found sleep in my bed. But I was nowhere. Nothing was were it should have been. Nothing was where I remembered it. Somebody came in the night and moved everything just a few inches to the left. Moved me. The colours were all wrong. People’s words wore the wrong voices. Everyone’s skin was too sizes too small and worn inside out. There were sharks in the clouds.
Nations grow to crumble. Kingdoms rise to fall. Empires spread to shrink. This is the natural law. But memories don’t live the same. They go on; in the wind, in the faces of those you meet, in their voices and words, in their nightmares, in your dreams… they linger. Places in your head become too dark and cold to go to. Bodies rot. Maggots nestle in eye sockets. You taste the stench at the back of your throat there. Children are shoved in shallow graves. Sand lands in open mouths and glassy eyes. Limbs fall yards away from owners. Heads are spilt open with machetes. Blood splatters on crazed faces. There’s sound of metal against bone. Bone fragments and pus nestle on the clothes of fourteen year olds. Hands massage the last breath out of twitching old men. You recognize those hands. You bite your lips and wait for the twitching to stop. You watch mothers bury their seeds that you put in the dust. Ak’s stutter. You feel the vibration in your body and a few yards ahead of you bodies with torsos pumped full of lead shells crumble to the earth. Your windshield is splattered with vultures, limbs and pus as you drive down Main Street. Everything is burnt, burning or lined for the fire. Guns blazing, bones cracking, grenades blowing and houses crumbling are supported by wails and screams to provide the perfect soundtrack to your day. You kick back and watch, through weed smoke and blunted vision, as rabid dogs grow fat on the buffets lining the streets. You survive on liquor because the water’s flooded with blood and limb.

These are the places in my head. This is where I lived, among the creatures of the night: ghosts searching to find a way home, strangled memories refusing to take their last breath and haunted dreams hiding in the mist. It’s been many years since. And there’s still no space between then and now. Days pass and double back on themselves. Time crawls back at night. Dawn comes to see me standing in the shadows of memories so vivid they refuse to be confined only to places in my head.

I decided to sit tight and last out my days. I’d walk in the shadows-being neither nor-and wait for the coming of the end. I’d lived past it all. Dreamed my way below, or above, it all. Became a Buda of sorts. I knew I’d not transcended. Something else had happened. It was not enlightenment. Guess if you walk enough miles you will eventually walk off the face of the earth.

It was not war that drove me away.

I escaped the peace.