We've got some ways to go, if we ever found each other trying to traverse a path together.

That picket fence you spoke of, that one with all the pretty green grass and flowers dotting around a house of yellow or blue - whatever suits your fancy - seems just out of reach. It's like a perfect little dream, all wrapped up and easily in reach.

If you could have made me continue to dig at it with you.

You have a funny way about leveraging your wants against mine, making it really easy to kind of dig the knife in where you'd think there's birds chirping and neighbors walking.

No, it's... more like a memory of a nightmare.

Every single moment we spent together, was hell on Earth. The moment you touched me, it all went wrong. A hand on the shoulder, a hug. It was... revolting, like I was taking my skin and turning it inside out because every emotion I had at you felt unreal and bare.

It was like you couldn't stop hurting me, and I couldn't stop hating you. I hated the thought of being a part of you. That I was some... fucked up spawn meant to just watch you burn alive. Burn yourself alive while your mother threw sticks into your tinder.

What kind of hell would you have had me live, watching that all go down and then stick with it? Forty years of hell like you? Huh, maybe I can start having kids right around when you do?

No. No. I'm not. I never did and I never would.

Because I didn't.

I'll never understand how you could be the mat on the floor, and then complain when shoes walked over you. I'll never be able to quite comprehend how you wanted me so bad, but you did next to nothing to take care of me. Teeth aching? Yours were rotten. Head hurting? Clean the house. Ugh! I don't know why I admired you! I don't know why I believed in you so much until we were throwing blows at each other that day when I knew it was all a façade.

You never cared about me! You never cared about her! You only cared about how tortured you were and how much you just couldn't fucking leave!

And that's why you're still there, right?

Still letting her within reach to chase you.

Letting her be more than a haunting memory to you.

And you'd be that for me to. You'd give me that.

I want so bad to say somewhere in me loves you, but I don't. I want to say that I hate you, but I don't. I pity you, in the way that someone watches an animal suffering in a cage in a zoo and walks on. We're not the same. You and I.

You may have had me, but I'm not here to live and just die.

Signed,

You know who

Being around you means learning to read again.

But instead of sounding out letters, I'm puzzling over the tilt of your head.

I'm watching the corners of your mouth.

I'm trying to understand the word scribbled in the shape of your brows.

Why is it so hard to understand the meaning behind the slope of your shoulders?

Can you explain why your laugh seems to rhyme with when you cry?

What kind of vowels are your hands making?

Are those signals in your tone platonic, phonetic, or romantic?

Please write your body language in CAPITALS, because I keep skipping over the consonants and silent E's in your gaze.

The first thing I remember is darkness, glowing faintly red. Back then, I was an amphibian, a human being who could breathe in my mother’s amniotic waters. I remember the light, the fear—and then a slap.

Yesterday, outside my five-story apartment building—a typical one for the country now “unspeakable,” the supposed threat to all humanity—I overheard a conversation between some local guys. One of them said,

“Where everyone sees a problem, I see opportunities.”

A perfect motto for the years when I lived my early life. The 1990s in Russia, a country that had just shed its red uniform. A ruined, violated land where gangsters and oligarchs tore apart the remnants of the motherland.

From a young age, I knew three rules for survival. My grandmother, who had been a radio operator during the Great Patriotic War, taught me these:

Never get into a car with strangers.

Be home by four.

Never open the door to anyone.

And I also remember my mother’s breath.

The rest of my memories are scattered. Here I am, pushing a stranger’s stroller with a little boy through my small ghetto. Mothers stroll with their children, the streets are still green, untouched by the ever-present dust from the steppes. It’s different now.

Then, it’s like a void: nothing until my grandfather picks me up in his arms. That memory is vivid. He had grown up in a village and drank heavily. My father said my grandmother died from the stress he caused when my dad was 16. But I only learned this when I turned 20.

At that moment, I was just a baby. My grandfather held me, smiling. In his kitchen, there was an aluminum basin where he soaked apples for winter. My mother told me he passed away two days later.

It’s strange that I remember this—I was only one year old. I think my childhood ended when I first learned about death.

I remember that moment. I was three, and my mom was putting me down for a nap. She lay beside me, wrapping her arms around me. Her voice was soft and soothing, almost like silk. She was half-asleep, and I stared at the golden curtains swaying gently in the breeze. That glow—it still comes back to me when I need to feel happy.

Because happiness is a choice. Even then, I understood that.

I heard our neighbor—a hunched old woman named Zhenya—open her door. Suddenly, I asked my mom,

“Why does Grandma Zhenya look so different from you or me?”

Half-asleep, she murmured,

“She’s old. She’ll pass away soon.”

“What does ‘pass away’ mean?” I asked.

Mom opened her eyes and answered gently,

“Sweetheart, we all leave one day and never come back.”

I lay there with my eyes wide open while Mom drifted off to sleep. And then I burst into tears, sobbing loudly:

“Mom, I don’t want to die! I don’t want you to die!”

Mom hugged me tightly and said it wouldn’t happen for a very long time, and that she’d always be there for me.

Now I’m 34, and my mom is 68, but I still hope that what she said is true.

My childhood was a good one—good enough, considering how bad things were outside, on the streets. My parents worked in the theater, and I would climb around the stage, hide among the props, and watch adult performances.

But that’s another story, and I wouldn’t want to bore you.

What surprises me most is that this is the first time I’ve written about myself.

I keep waiting for noise.

My ears ring with its absence,

like phantom limb pain

for a sound that's gone.

The neighbor's wind chimes

still make me flinch.

But there's only breeze now,

no distant thunder of shells.

My tea grows cold

while I watch clouds.

They're just clouds now,

not signals or signs.

Sparrows have returned

to nest in broken eaves.

Strange how ordinary songs

fill spaces bombs left behind.

My hands remember

the weight of a rifle

but hold garden tools instead.

The dirt accepts them both.

The kids next door play war.

I want to tell them

they're doing it wrong—

too much laughing, too much joy.

But their peace is real,

not this quiet I wear

like borrowed clothes,

still stiff with tags.

At night I count heartbeats,

not casualties.

The numbers mean nothing now.

Nothing needs counting.

Sometimes I catch myself

planning escape routes

through my own garden.

Old habits die harder than people.

The silence stretches,

thick as armor.

I'm still learning

how to laugh again.

The neon buzzed and flickered against the wet asphalt, and Martin watched it pulse with the steady determination of a fading heartbeat. The sign was old now. Everything was old here. He stood in the rain and listened to the sound of water hitting his shoulders and thought about how time moves in only one direction.

Inside the Main Street Diner, chrome surfaces reflected fractured light that danced and spiraled across the walls like lost memories seeking their owners, while the linoleum floor bore the patient scars of ten thousand footsteps, each one carrying its own story of arrival or departure or both. The bell rang when he entered. It was a clean sound. A true sound.

Tommy sat at the counter. His shoulders were broad and heavy with years of manual labor, and his hands were scarred from wrenches and engines and the countless small betrayals of mechanical things. He did not turn around.

"Figured you'd show up." Tommy spoke to his coffee cup. The coffee was black and still steaming. "Read about your mother in the paper."

Martin sat. The stool creaked. It was the same sound it had made twenty years ago, when they were young and the future was a bright coin they thought they could spend forever.

"Hello, Tommy."

The waitress came. She wore a nametag that said Dorothy, but she was not the Dorothy they had known. That Dorothy was dead now. Everything dies eventually. Martin ordered coffee because it was the only thing to do.

"Still drinking it black?" Tommy asked, and his voice carried the weight of decades spent watching others leave while he remained, anchored to this town like a ship that had forgotten how to sail. "Some things don't change."

"Some things do."

Tommy's laugh cut through the diner's measured silence like a blade through old rope. "Yeah. Like you becoming the big Boston lawyer while I stayed here fixing engines that keep getting older while the parts get harder to find."

The coffee came. It was hot and bitter and true. Martin wrapped his hands around the mug and felt the heat seep into his fingers. The diner's air conditioning hummed with mechanical persistence. It had always been too cold here.

"You chose to stay," Martin said.

"Did I?" Tommy turned then, and his face was a map of years spent wondering about roads not taken. "Or did you choose to leave?"

Outside, the neon sign kept its vigil against the darkness. Pink light, then darkness. Pink light, then darkness. A rhythm as steady as regret.

"Remember that summer we were going to drive across the country?" Tommy's voice was soft now, dangerous with memory. "You had that AAA atlas. All those red marks showing where we'd stop. Like droplets of blood on a paper dream."

"We were eighteen."

"And then Harvard called, and suddenly the whole world got bigger for you and smaller for me at the same time." Tommy's fingers traced patterns in the condensation on his coffee mug. They were a mechanic's fingers, thick and strong and honest. "Funny how that works."

The silence between them grew like shadows at sunset, long and deep and full of things that could not be said. The coffee grew cold. The neon kept its rhythm. Pink light. Darkness. Pink light. Darkness.

"I never meant to leave you behind," Martin said. The words fell between them like autumn leaves, beautiful and dead.

"Doesn't matter what you meant." Tommy's voice was flat and hard as the surface of the counter. "You left. I stayed. The rest is just details."

Martin remembered summer afternoons in Tommy's garage, the air thick with motor oil and possibility, their hands black with grease as they rebuilt engines and futures with equal determination. Now the air smelled only of coffee and time.

"I miss you sometimes," Martin said.

"Miss what? The kid I was or the man I became?"

"Both. Neither. I don't know."

Tommy nodded slowly, understanding everything and nothing. "That's the thing about ghosts. They're always what we need them to be, not what they are."

The bell rang again. New customers entered, their voices carrying the light certainty of people who had never lost anything that mattered. Martin reached for his wallet.

"Don't," Tommy said. His voice was gravel and rust. "This one's on the house. For old times."

Martin stood. The vinyl seat exhaled beneath him like a final breath. "Take care, Tommy."

"You too, Marty. Try not to wait for the next funeral."

Outside, the rain had stopped, but the sidewalk held its wetness like a memory. Martin walked to his rental car, each step a small betrayal. Through the window, Tommy sat motionless at the counter, frozen in time like a photograph of permanence, his hands still cupped around a coffee mug that had grown cold with waiting.

Pink light. Darkness. Pink light. Darkness.

The neon kept its rhythm, and the night held its secrets, and some things changed while others remained as constant as gravity, as relentless as time, as eternal as regret.

war is always within and against the self

I.

the first War is against imposed order

from the cradle

of civilization

to the grave

of the soul

II.

the second War is against perceived other

a processing

of elimination

to iron our

difference

III.

the third War is against the internal org

neutralizing

of operation

to pin a

dying flesh

IV.

the fourth War is against the imagination

12.12.2024

War I, II, III, IV challenge @dctezcan

When two

join hands

one turns left

the other turns right

and impossibly,

they meet the middle

and make a promise

becoming one

War is the deliberate choice against compromise. Hate at its great(est).

We the people with what power?

Power(less) to choose our paths,

our leaders.

A flawed system,

we are living towards our future ruins.

One by one all great civilizations fall and for too long we’ve turned a blind eye, ignoring the impending self destruction.

War is simple, stewardship is for the deserving.

The Irish Child gathered rocks to fling at the English soldiers in the streets of Belfast.

Fire, from molotov cocktails made from bottles filled with petrol, launched at tanks rattling in the streets.

The Irish Child only knew war, not caring about political affiliations or even the reasons why.

Or even knowing anything about the conflict itself, only that his parent's were against the soldiers, and he would protect them with his life.

The Irish Child grew a scatterwag in the streets, banging bin lids in cobblestone street at the approach of soldiers.

Burning bottle, rock, glass, wood and finally bullet, though that was a game the adults played. The deadliest game of all.

Vale the Irish Child, weep the Irish child,

Cry for innocence, all for the Irish child.

With varying degrees of intensity,

my internal war rages on.

Freedom of choice vs. obligation to others,

a conflict that’s been fought since time’s dawn.

The battle requires a decision to be made

that personal responsibility must mediate.

Choosing a position to take is juxtaposed

to choosing a position to abdicate.

The skirmish renews each morning,

since the tempest percolates whilst I sleep.

There’s no option that involves fleeing

because the repercussion would echo too deep.

I long for a palatable solution,

which could usher in welcomed peace.

But my internal war will continue raging on,

'til I find an existential release.