Life As Practical

It's a bloody business, this war and killing and all. I suppose you get used to it eventually; deaf to the gunshots like you callus to hard labor, blind to the gore like the sun becomes dim to your eyes. One letter after another floats in from unfamiliar hands, with unfamiliar writing tracing familiar dust-pictures of familiar faces, and one begins to wonder how long it will take to be hard to the pain like one is deaf to the noise.

It's bloody brutal, though, bloody brutal business, and I've seen enough of it to be eternally dulled to the reason behind it all.

Eventually, though, you learn. You learn how to deal with it. You learn to crush the pain and loneliness down into a hard stone in your chest, and you learn how to swallow sand and you learn how to drink saltwater and to look away. You learn to be the seeing blind, you learn to be the hearing deaf, you learn to be ignorant. I don't cry anymore. You gotta learn to stop crying. There's not much question about it. You've only got two choices, and that's either to be soft and continually hurt, or to be hard and emotionless but never injured.

You learn that physical pain is infinitely easier than emotional pain, and physical pain is far easier to control. I've got scars on my arms from that learning process. When one inflicts injury on one's self in a physical manner, it's a sign of emotional weakness. I didn't know that then. I'm better now.

It's still a bloody business, and you still see sights horrible enough to make your soul shatter, and you'll still hear screams long into the night when, in a perfect world, we'd all be sleeping and content. You still see corpses of former acquaintences, but you don't recognize them on an emotional level. Emotions are dangerous when you're here. You can't let them affect your vision or you'll be sightless for the rest of your life. You've gotta be hard. Like me. Gotta be hard like me.

You learn not to make friends, too. Friends, in a perfect world, would be there to get your back when you fall, but not here. Nah. Here friends are a danger to your soul, because if you're soul's not as solid as ice then you'll never survive. What's worse, to see your love die in a friend or to see that love turn to hate in the moment of betrayal? Doesn't matter. You can avoid it both.

Never said I liked it. Never said it's what I would want, but it's what's gotta be, and you gotta learn to survive here. You gotta learn that silence is better than words in any situation, and to show feeling is to bare your chest for the blade. It's just how it is. It's a hard lesson to learn but it's the only one worth teaching.

Bloody brutal business, though. Bloody brutal.