Flames – Reminiscence of a Soldier

Fire. The pulse of fire is dangerous; the feel of it is excruciating, and the colors reflecting its anger... so very mesmerizing. It is the opposite of healing; it brings destruction and pain. Its very make-up is alive, breathing, stretching, moving on without a master’s leash to hold it back, no control or restraint to keep it still. Its nature is to consume everything in its path, wipe away everything it finds unclean. It is wild; it is a sweltering burden to whoever has learned its secrets, forcing them to walk on a razor’s edge between humanity and savagery, eventually tearing the person apart from the inside out.

How long would minds run miles with the secrets and tire themselves from their weight? How was it possible to continue to carry those sentences through years of life, putting them to use when told to, despite better judgment telling owners of such minds to cease the senseless prattling? How long had thesecrets brought misery and pain to minds and heart, breaking down all the sturdy mental walls of silicon and chrome?

And how long was one to stay out here, not knowing if they were to go home safely, away from this already singed landscape that barely hid a fox in its underbrush?

He found himself asking these questions many times, re-thinking them until his mind told him to shut up about it. He knew he couldn’t keep following the same routine—the routine to snap his fingers once and feel the ground still shaking in the aftermath—all the way to his dying day. His dying day was unpredictable; it seemed so distant, as if mocking him from afar, mocking him in a way that made his burdens ever harder to bear.

What was there to gain through his ever-disparaging life in the battlefield, gun in hand, ready to kill or be killed?

There’s nothing but the fire you command.

How true. How so very true. His hands commanded the fire that ate at everything, that breathed destruction and whispered death in the ears of all living beings in its path. One snap of a finger—and then it was gone. Buildings, human beings, and even the entire landscape was wiped away, cleansed by the fire until it died away into the distance. No rats escaped its fury by hiding in the bushes. Those were gone, too. Not even a simple butterfly was spared—though how they survived out here in the first place was a mystery—and its child-like innocence and ignorance caused its own demise.

A young man, his hair mocking Poe’s Raven and his eyes ablaze like coal thrown into a fire, let out a soft sigh as he leaned back against the mound that covered him from sight. The dirt of the mound shifted as his weight dented the perfect oval-like shape, and the mound responded by breaking up, trickling down in rivers of beads. The grains attempted to cover up the human who dare to challenge its perfection, but its futile efforts weren’t even noticed. Specks of dark brown, tan, chocolate, and light brown; all the colors mixed to form a coalition, its only goal to bury the man who dared interrupt their time to shine, though there wasn’t much to shine about.

True, the only shine in this barren land was metal that seemed to be forever engraved with the fire, reflections of the dancing red and orange heat creating a dizzy cloud of smoke to make one nauseous inside, head spinning with vertigo, until all one saw was the darkness looming—

And Ling awoke, but this time staring up at a ceiling of white, blurred by the sleep that he had been under for God only knew how long. He was back in the place where the air smelled of disinfectant, where people always wore white to compliment the rooms, carrying clipboards decorated with charts and graphs—results that made little sense unless you could figure out the key meaning behind the numbers and letters of a foreign language.

Ling closed his eyes for a few moments before opening them again and focusing on the pallid ceiling. He was in pain, the pain of losing part of oneself. It was the kind of pain resembled the same inferno that he remembered beginning so long ago—except that it was in the back of his head. That was the physical pain, something he was used to. But this was the kind of pain that resided in his chest, in a place where no soldier was allowed to trail back to, in a place where just searching for the emotions behind the actions could result in an eternal darkness, eyes never free to open again.

But for now, that didn’t matter to Ling. Because he was remembering. Remembering everything that had long passed, everything that had made him, everything that had shaped his humanity. Everything. The flames are never completely extinguished.

They still burn.