Coming Back from the War

It was new. We thought we were both too old for anything new in our lives. We had long given up on anything coming along, bringing change, to make our lives new again. We had both grown older, living different lives, far away from each other, neither of us knowing what had happened to the other.

I could remember the time when I had taken the train out of her life, leaving her behind on that station.

I had made her promise not to wait for me. Both of us knew the war meant many of us would not be coming back. For those of us who did return, though, what we returned to would not be the same as we’d left behind.

The world after the war was a very different place. When we returned, what remained of what we’d marched off to defend was ruined and broken. The people we’d marched off to defend were ruined and broken too. All with the lines of war in their faces, just as our faces betrayed the ghosts of the battlefields that haunted us, even long after the war was over.

I did not come back for a long time. For many months – over a year – I patrolled the corridors of the hospital learning how to be alive again. Always seeing the faces of those I’d left behind in my dreams and in the shadows, filling the silences with their screams and telling me the stories of how they’d died, twisting in agony and fear.

The old home town was a shattered shell when I found my way back there. It was all ruins and wreckage, amongst which the ruins and wreckage of those we’d left behind created a kind of life for themselves. They were more akin to rats and scavengers than the proud people who had waved us off to war.

All things end eventually, even the war had ended, much to the surprise of those of us looking around in wonder that we’d survived. Eventually too, some prosperity returned as new towns grew out of the wreckage and the people became less feral and slowly turned human again.

Then, one day, walking down the reinvigorated High Street, I saw her once again. It was as if the long war years and the post-war decades had never been as I looked into those eyes that had held only tears of goodbye when last we’d kissed. It was like something new, like a flower found blooming on the bomb-sites, as if the tired, ruined, world we lived in had found a way to begin again.