#hwd

also on ao3

None of us had really planned for the future, ironically enough.

We all dreamt of the Future, awaited with bated breath the modernity that would push away the weight of the past, dreamt of power and speed and fighting and winning and victory. Victory for our homeland. Victory for us. But no one gave a thought to what came after the rapid rhythm of youth, what would become of us when we became, inevitably, that which we swore to reject.

There was, after all, only one way to evade old age.

Everyone I knew enlisted. We all wanted glory, we all wanted destruction, and the sweet, metallic taste of war sat well on our naïve tongues. Beauty was chaos, and we were fickle.

Sometime between the shell falling on our breakfast of stale bread and sour milk and the funeral of the boy I’d shared a room with, I realised that we’d never realise the Future. We were living in the future, and the metallic taste wasn’t so sweet anymore.

The shell earned me a bum leg, which earned me a sad place at a dull bar in a bad town. The bartender knew me by name. My brother insisted I live with him, saying I’d just get lonely if I went back home, but since the war ended there was a crater between us. He had been too young to enlist. I would have studied as he did, had I not enlisted.

Feliciano studied architecture. He rambled on about creation, rejuvenation, modernity, and I never had the heart to tell him about our plans for the Future. He was serving God and the country, he said. Building it up, making it stronger — realising dreams, like they did in New York. When we spoke of the Future, I had to remind myself, we were serving ourselves, so it wasn’t the same. Except — after the shell — I wondered if serving God was the same as serving oneself after all.

He was out most days, and I was out most nights — during the day, I wrote, trying to make words flow with a shaky hand. I missed the South, and I thought all the time about returning to Napoli, but my stories weren’t selling and drinks and cigarettes were my comfort. The bartender — as I sat in my sad place in that dull bar — would raise a glass to me, and then I’d be numb enough to get through another night.

None of us planned for this future.

I was a day away from thirty, a day away from the doom my younger self had rejected so violently, when a different kind of bomb dropped. My fourth glass of cognac, perhaps, was the trigger, and before I knew it I was talking to him, my tongue loose and sharp — my entire life was slurred out, bore naked before the stranger who poured my drinks. The Future. The war. The shell, the deaths, the screams, the sleepless nights and endless days—

He stayed silent until I was crying, heaving sobs and knocking my drink over. And then he smiled, sadly, and said: “Léon, you have lived.”

He did not fight in the war, he said. He could not offer me any words of wisdom. But he offered me a shoulder, and with heavy limbs I accepted, and he held me.

I was thirty. I was no longer young. The Future was not, and would never be real. But his arms were real, his comfort was real, and in a haze of hard liquor, his love was real. My brother and his love for the Lord would have wept, but my God was in this man, in this bar, in this moment.