The guards told us nothing about why we were arrested. They were silent as stone. Above the gray-cast sky spread for miles. Today was gloomy and unendurable. Rain had not fallen for a long time, and all the harvest was failing. The whole country was weeping but we had no tears. We were starved. Everything fell from us so easily, our country, our name, our identity, everything! They obliterated

I wondered what they thought--

How they saw us starving men.

That was how far we had regressed, to the point that most of us were in an infantile state. Some cried for hours, yelping, “Mother! Mother! Save me, Mother!”

Those who were oldtimers already knew--

They’d die first.

As for the rest of us, our life went on and on; time became so pointless that we no longer tracked it. What is a week compared to a year? What is a year compared to a decade? Prison ground us so completely and totally that we could not even begin to care. Our apathy was so great that when a man was whipped to death before our eyes, we did not even flinch, not even when it was the same man who offered his bread of the day yesterday.

And the saints!

The damned idealists who thought there were saints are fools. Anyone who was imprisoned knew otherwise. True, there were a few, yet the multitudes drowned them out. When everyone else was thieving to have his own way, the malignants always sucked them dry first. The first to be taken advantage of and the first to die, their morality was a liability. Saints may exist. There is always a shining golden figure in any time of history, in any moment.

But iniquity annihilates them.

Standing up to the system of zero-sum, trying to reason with the machine, it was a fruitless task.

Indeed, all of us were grateful when he gave that bread, but he could not live without it. He collapsed that very day. He died before our very eyes. And what did we do to return the favor?

Watch.

If we were to look through the crowd, I’m sure some of us weren’t thinking, “Oh, what a heroic act!”

I’m certain some of us were envious, “Why didn’t I get the bread?” Hell. I was one of them.

Nobody can dissuade me of my misanthropy. After the system broke my back, I could not even stand tall with human dignity. I lost it. And any naive brat who says that I could have endured is so removed from reality that I’d like to knock some sense into him!

One can’t blame me!

Not when my entire world was crumbling, not when my entire psyche was breaking, not when my entire body was failing, not then, not now.

I grimly smile. Of all the friends I had, all have died. I am the lone warrior left alive, the last man standing. It would have been better had I died. That is the sweetest mercy. In the end, death truly is happiness. In the end, the capacity to do evil is greater than the capacity to good. In the end, why couldn’t I have been the one who died?

Regrets pile up on me. Living is a curse, so much of a curse that it depresses me. There is a sense of alienation. I am the last one standing. After all the misery I have gone through, surely, anyone would empathize, right?! Right?! Am I crazy?! Has the whole world gone mad?!

No.

Because there is a certain threshold of trauma. One can’t discount rape, murder, and death because even then there are people who are victims of such fates. Those are “common” tragedies, common in the sense that you could surely find someone who would empathize. A grieving family of a murdered victim, the young woman who weeps for her virginity, the old man who lays on his deathbed, they are innumerable!

So what do you say to the man who has gone through something far worse?

Something beyond the imaginings of even abnormalcy itself?

Yes, those are aberrations. In this country, I am free, I am alive, I am healthy; I should be grateful! Making it out of that hell, I shouldn’t be complaining about how terrible my fate was!

Yet still I do.

Why?

Because there is not a soul left to tell this story.

I make do with those who I know. I describe in detail the agony I endured, but it becomes so sick that most people run away. Those who are left, they’re probably sick in the head for being able to hear such gruesome descriptions. Still, there are a few. They tell me that it was horrible, that I suffered, but that I am alive.

Says the person who never went through such tortures!

You could not understand. You weren’t there. You didn’t feel the pain I went through. You didn’t understand the exactitude of it all!

So how could you pass such feeble words to me?!

I’m alive? That’s it?

I’d be more grateful if I were dead. Then, perhaps then, I would have met my Maker, and there I could question Him. Yet here I am.

So many questions--

None of them answered.

Why am I alive? How did I survive for so many years?

Well, that is a very easy answer. Just as I did in the camps, in the prisons, in the fields, I shut down everything. All feeling died. Numbness overflowed, the aforementioned apathy. It was and is the only way to live. Otherwise, I could sit with the thoughts of the sheer magnitude of it all and it would crush me. Contemplating an act so evil it couldn’t possibly exist but does, how does one reconcile that with a belief in humanity? That is why I am a misanthrope.

And I already considered the number of suicides. Even those who had lived, they could not forget their trauma and so the pressure ground them. Boots broke their faces, whips lacerated their back, sleeplessness stole their sanity. And in the absence?

Only silence.

How could I possibly live with the fact of what I had endured?

Still, I lived with that numbness for thirty years. I can no longer bear it. Loss of sensation means anhedonia as well but that is a relic of the past. I no longer need to numb myself. I have all my basic needs met. The freedom I dreamt of is finally mine. I am alive. I am free. Surely, those two facts would have saved me.

But I’m broken.

Everyone else was broken.

Therefore, I pull the service rifle I had. When I was captured, it was acquisitioned by the enemy. By chance, I found it the day I was liberated. It was in a pile of broken guns. I find that so incredibly morbid.

The weapon I used to kill others was found the day I was freed, on the day I was revitalized.

It’s fixed up now.

All is set.

I contemplated writing a letter to the family explaining why, but then the nurse would find it and I would not be able to die. I will not permit that right to be taken. I’ve heard of plenty of cases where it was, and the imprisoned certainly was nursed back to health. The media reported full recoveries. They said that despite the agony of that moment and of the trauma from before they planned to kill themselves, the meaning of life redeemed them for it. After their attempt, they realized they could still live life despite all the shadows, that they could still carry on and accept their meager happiness. They had love. If I could sum it up, there it is--

They had love.

Whereas, in my case, I have none. Nobody wants to deal with a PTSD-laden man of war. Hell, nobody remembers it! My children died. Only my grandchildren are alive, and they could not begin to understand just how bloody that war was. Nobody understand.

Certainly, I could attend the war survivor meetings. I attended one or two of those but everyone’s stories were all so beautiful. They made something of their tragedy. But me?

All I birthed from it was further tragedy.

I alienated the only family I have. I closed myself into this hollow shell. I am decaying in this empty space devoid of warmth.

It’s all but certain.

The fault lays all with me and I must die for it.

Reversing it would take so much effort, effort that I can’t even bring myself to believe in. The war brought out in the worst in me. It festered in the prisons. Now, a nested existence remains lodged in my heart. Pessimism and self-loathing are permanent. This is the easiest, quickest solution to that problem.

In my hand is the gun.

For minutes, perhaps an hour, I stare at it. Even when asking for death, it’s another thing to bring it. The more I hesitate, the less likely I am to shoot myself. Did I really steel my heart for this? Can I really do it?

Over the course of the years, I have brought this gun out and then put it back in. Again and again, I vacillate. Funnily enough, I have never been caught.

Just as I say that, the door of my study room opens.

Ahaha, Mr. Maker, what a shitty joke. Isn’t life full of surprises?