If We Want Our Love To Survive, We Must Put Our Weapons Down

Immediately after things blow up, your first instinct is to look around and pick up all the pieces, and try to repair what’s been damaged. You scramble around in the rubble, clinging to any possible sign of life.

Immediately after things blow up clarity vanishes. It’s only once the smoke clears that you can actually see. And sometimes clarity brings a few more questions, most that can’t be easily answered. And sometimes, clarity brings answers to the questions you didn’t even know you had.

Look around you. Look at the debris lying on the ground, ripped apart, covered in the ash of what used to be “us.” Landmines are just waiting to go off, bombs are being thrown left and right. Look at the empty shells surrounding us. The empty shell of a warrior, the empty shell of a soul, and the empty shell of a love that was drafted, ill prepared, unwilling, and raw.

Bullets surround us, but who was the one firing? What’s more painful, death by enemy fire, or by friendly fire?

I need to stop trying to put together the fractured pieces of what we used to be. It’s time we admit that things are never going to be the same between us.

The day you told me you cheated I fell out of love with you and into a battlefield. And in the days following, I distanced my heart even more. You were fighting a battle to win and I was hiding in a foxhole, listening, waiting, searching for answers, and allies. I was fighting a battle alone. And while I am still working on forgiving you, I need you to forgive yourself as well.

Your self-hatred comes out in your interactions with me and it pushes me away even further; heating up the battle without any desire.

If you and I will ever come out of this alive, we need to stop the war against each other, and fight for each other, arm in arm, hand in hand and empty shell to empty shell. We are wounded, we are scarred, but we are not alone.

We have to stop hoping that we’ll go back to the way we were pre-war. We will never go back. The pure, untarnished hope, trust, and maybe even naive love has been damaged; that is now pieces of rubble that can never be put together.

How foolish were we to believe that our love was above the obstacles of life? How naive we were to think that nothing bad could ever come between us? How hopeful are we to believe that we could ever go back to that?

It may be us against the enemy, but luckily for us, we have more allies than enemies. We have an army of allies behind us who remember life before war, who were there for the draft, who witnessed the first shot fired, and who are just praying for peace. They are our medics, our guide dogs, and our maps, they are the ones who remind us that while war is never easy, love can prevail.

While it’s true that things will never be the same, that doesn’t mean that we will cease to be.

We have to forgive, and wipe the slate clean, so that we can begin reparations and re-building. Even once peace has been reached, the effects of war are still long-lasting. But if we don’t start anew, we may never start again. We have to have to end a chapter of our pre-war love and start with a new beginning. We need to embrace each other, and let go of the past. We need to let the hope we have light our way, and pray that we will only grow stronger.

We have to believe that we can make it, and just maybe we will.