#capturedgrace

   He used to sleep soundly before the war. It used to take him not that long to sink into the mattress uncurl from a day of working and sink right into sleep. His sleeping patterns were real nice before the war, most of the time he’d stay up listening to the radio with the youngest brother Eugene. When the older ones had left for war it became a habit to listen to the radio for any reports or anything important. Sleep still came easy even if his mind was a little troubled by the news. He never dwelled on it for too long.      Sleeping in foxholes. Well that sucked. He learned not to sleep in the war. After Anthony’s death he doesn’t sleep much at all. He learned not to sleep for the war, but losing family out here. It leaves your mind running, leaves you wondering if you’ll be next. He learned to survive on a hour or two of sleep after that death. Sleep never came easy to him, even before his brother’s death, the scent of death lingered too much for him to be able to sleep well.    After the war, nothing really changed for him. Sleep does not come easy. In the wake of night terrors, more than often he rises early, not because he wants to but because his realty haunts his dreams. He has nightmares from the war that he will not talk about. The death of his brother is a subject that he has avoided to no end, it is one memory that no one else needs to know about or the fact he carries so much guilt. And this type of thing drags at his core, makes him less able to sleep, makes him more awake in the hours of dawn when everyone should be sleeping but he’s awake.      the war doesn’t end when you get home, you carry it in your sleep.

  You ought to believe the lies you tell others. You outta believe that you are alive. That home was not and will not ever be a grave six feet under the muddy waters. But here you stand fragmented: because you survived. You had survived but at what cost? Fair skin, freckled tones, you are breathing but with that weight on your chest sometimes it doesn’t feel like it. Sometimes you wonder what it would have been like had you not lost him. Glenn knows the horrors, knows the way it travels down his bones. The way that light is carried outwards, the way that rage is hot and hot and hot. The way that the mud was not just mud to him, how it made him remember soldiers injured calling to medics. He remembers one medic with such a will to drag men out alive without ever using a gun. He had seen that medic run over and over to save and save and save. He presses his fingers into his temple rubbing and rubbing. He’s got Glenn and Eugene back home: but he lost a brother still. He survived while the other died. Was this what he got from God’s graces for heading to the war so much later?              “:You got a smoke?” His grief in that second slips from the surface. The bottled pain, it’s laced and real and the only one that has ever heard it come outta his lips is Gene, because he knows how to get under his skin.  “It ain’t a victory, not when all of us didn’t come home.” He breathes out and out, trying to still himself. Trying to remember that he does not feel guilty, but easier said than done. He can still remember those dead eyes and the blood.