No one tells you why softness hurts after the war.
They tell you that you brought the war home with you. That you wear violence and rage and guilt in your bones like an albatross around your neck and you mustn't let it drown you. They tell you that flashbacks will trap you in the past when at home, here and now, you are safe. You are loved. You are cared for.
But they forget to warn you that every night as you lay your head down somewhere soft, you will hear your own heartbeat in your ears and mistake it for another's. They forget to talk about the way you will tremble like a leaf the first time someone offers you love without strings again. Sure that it's a trick. They forget that what your bones know now is the scream of bombs falling, the crack of shattering wood and stucco, and the soft wheeze of lungs gasping out an end.
They forget it was real.
So when you wake up screaming and your lover holds you tightly to their chest, you claw and kick and hurt them in your desperation to breathe again. When the sky opens, the cold damp of the storm feels like clarity. You simply do not doubt that the world, raw and beautiful, will kill you in one indifferent moment. Bury you under the rubble of yourself while the flames lick their way up the sequoias around you. They say you stoked the embers but you know someone else got there first.
The truth is that you brought the war home to them, and they wish you would stop sorting through the pieces on the kitchen counter where the acrid smell of char and blood makes them wrinkle their nose and turn away. The truth is that when you went away, you didn't just carry home fragments of the war, you BECAME the war. To them at least. You remind them of the price they pay for their comfort. And in doing so, you deny them its ease.
It's the oldest promise in the world. Fight for me. Bleed for me. Kill for me. Lose yourself in the violence of survival for ME. And when you are done, remember there is no place for revolutionaries after the battles are won. After all. They turned on their leaders once. They might do it again. That makes them dangerous, and while they may have been heroes once, after the war ends this is barely enough to earn them the mercy of a quick death.
So no one tells you that the softness hurts because it still carries a threat. Instead they tell you that YOU'RE the threat, and you frighten them with your hands stained in blood and your gut-wrenching sobs on your lips. They stand their ground with steel and lead. They tell you to stop resisting as you bleed out at their feet. When you fail to die they call you monster and witch and name it proof of your fall from grace. When your body goes still and cold, they turn you into a myth and a warning to those that come after. They burn your corpse like tinder for their future and no one seems to hear you howling your injustice to the stars.
Like they can't hear all the other voices howling alongside your own.
