The Burden of Surviving

  — t r a b o c c o

War is where the world reveals,
what it has always been willing to take.


--

I’m still
in that photograph…

Years are scars.

And thoughts…
well,
they can
consume
a man.

I learned that long ago.
The day I buried
my younger brother.

He was just a child.
We both were.
He was all I knew.

He was dressed
to match me.

Seated upright.
Stiff.

A fence post
run horizontal,
up his back.

He sat straightened.
He sat like fear,
like make-believe.

It was a form of
cruel punishment
to witness him
in such a way.

The minutes tormented.
Memory is where the devil waits.

Memory

His mouth fell open,
tongue lay swollen,
dark,
nearly black,
wet with pooled blood
and decay;
an ugly weight
filling his mouth.

A painted pink smile
to cover the horror.

I can still smell him…

Death.
Putrid.
The flowers didn’t mask it.

I loved him alive.
He gave me daydreams.
I hated him dead.
He gave me night terrors.

It wasn’t his death
that broke me.
It was the thoughts
of a lonely life
without him.

Mother lost herself.
Deliriums.
Talking to us both
as though
he could answer.

My father
did what he could.
A broken man.

They staged us
for the photograph.

A boy made to look living.
Another taught
how much stillness
survival costs.

I died there as well.
The glassed photograph caught
two ghosts that day.

I stood by the open ground...
shovels rang on rock.

Each strike
made him more gone.
Iron on stone.

Hours later
we buried him.

The thud of the box
then quiet
death itself...
undeniable.

All I could hear
was the pause
and
myself
breathing.

Breath.
Shallow,
tight,
hollow,
like my brother.

I could feel the earth through my soles.

Sound returned hard,
mother's screams...

And the sky
gray.

God could not reach me then.
I walked it alone.

War

The cold came first.
Before thought.
Before fear.

An older man now.
A man still numb.

The cold
settled in
while I slept
on ground
that would not
give warmth back.

Air thick
with powder.
Old blood.
Men breathing
beside me
like work
instead of rest.

The sun does not
drive the frost out.
It stays
in the joints.
It hums
in the teeth.
It eats with you.
It starves with you.

You step over
what used to be a man.
A hand still open,
curled soft, fingers loose,
the way a child holds sleep,
palm up,
like it was waiting
for something
to be placed in it.
 
And do not stop…
because stopping
means kneeling
and kneeling
means breaking.

Fear is not loud.
It narrows.
Fewer thoughts.
Single instructions.

Load
Fire
Step

Breathe

Do not look long.

Wasteland.
A broken banjo.
Enemy.
Dirt.
Strings.

One strum.

Not music.

Sound.

Before sides.

Brothers.

Killing is only
for gaining ground.

They are bad.
We are good.

That’s enough.

A man can live with that.

Your side
is a
grouping
you are a part of.

If you were born
a hundred miles
in another direction,
you’d belong
to the other group.

Either way,
you don’t
get too familiar
with it.

Loss does not
announce itself.
It accumulates.

You stop learning names.
You stop asking
who was taken last night.

The ground becomes familiar.
You no longer hate it.

That is when you know
something has shifted
past repair.

They speak
of retreat
as shame.

They imagine
lines and flags.
They do not imagine
a body
going still
against your boot.

They do not imagine
the sound
a wound makes
when it will not close.

They do not imagine
waking
and knowing
fewer voices will answer.

I did not
step back
because
I feared dying.

I stepped back
because I feared
losing
what death
does not take
at once.

Judgment.
Memory.
The ability to look
another man in the eye
and know
why we are still standing.

I did not run.
I did not flee.

I walked
slow enough
that no one
fell behind.

Each step away
weighed more
than standing ever did.

I will never be whole again.
That is not tragedy.
It is fact.

War does not end.
It settles into the body.
It teaches the bones
what the world
is capable of.

You do not unlearn war.
You live beyond it.

I am still here.

There is breath.
There is memory.

There is the chance
that what
was broken
will not be
the last thing
we become.

Some men
are better prepared
than others
for the tremors
of battle.

My brother
was…
the scar I loved
the scar I endured.

He was
the wound
that hardened
this man
for all
that war
appropriates.

Survival is not victory.
Not triumph.

It is the refusal
to let the cold
take everything.

If there is meaning
after this,
it belongs to those
who knew
when to stop
paying with lives
they could
no longer
afford to spend.

If there is peace,
it will
be carried
by those who learned
the cost
of standing
and the cost
of stepping back,
walking away,
and choosing
the one that left
someone alive
to remember.

And if there is revelation,
it comes
in the moment
you realize
you are forgiven—
and must now
make space
for God
in your life.

That is war
as accurate
as I can claim it.

The cold.
The walking.

The burden
of having survived.

And the choice
to never
walk it alone
again.

Hank Fellows
Age 47
Father