lest we forget » lark

There were some things best left forgotten, things that he hadn’t thought about in years. He wondered what there was that made these things crop up in thought, what triggered these images that he had so successfully bured behind a marriage and the birth of his children. He hadn’t been the worst affected by the war, but he still remembered, could still see the beaches and the sandbags and the blood. It was rare that the remembered this war, so much messier than the last. In the last, he had been safely tucked away from it for the most part, his few battles leaving deep scars that sometimes refused to heal. There was a certain aggravation that came on days like this, a feeling that he just wanted to get rid of. He remembered, he remembered, and that was the last thing that he had wanted to do.

He’d lived through multiple wars, seen the look in young men’s eyes as they returned from Korea and Vietnam and seen it in the eyes of the youth from the war for the world. He knew it, he’d seen it every day since he’d returned from Europe from the war. They knew, knew that something was wrong with the world and that no matter how many times they put their lives in the hands of fate, they could do very little as an individual to change the way the world ended. They could fight, they could die, and if they made it through the world at that point, they could carry on. Sometimes, it was harder to forget the simple realities of war. It was nothing romantic, no knights in shining armor on white horses, just young men dying in the name of a cause, sometimes so abstract it was hard to understand.

He remembered.

On days like this, there was very little that he could do except drown out the memories in one way or another. At one point in time, his wife had kept him away from the worst of it, soothing it away with her calm words and presence. And then war took her from him. From then, he’d been floundering. He had more stability than usual, but he still floundered. Sex, alcohol, shooting, hunting, they all worked to different degrees but none were of the same quality of soothing that her presence had brought about in him, none of the peace. Perhaps it had been the fact that she too had lived through the bombs falling and the invasions and the realities of war. She’d seen it all and retained her vigor and helped him retain his sanity when he thought it would all fall away. He’d have taken shepherding one more crimson back to the world just to see her again. Chance had not been with him then. He’d sat in the field with her and sat in the morgue, three days to see if chance was on his side. He’d finally been manhandled out, tears in his eyes. He’d lost track then, letting everything that mattered slip out of his sights and settling into old habits, hunting and ignoring the emotions, like he had in his youth.

He knew that he wasn’t the only one that felt this way. He knew that he was lucky that he could avoid the memories more than others. He knew that sometimes the only thing that could be counted on were other people who knew the same pain, the same horror. And there was only one person that he knew he could count on for that understanding in the city, at least on an average day. There were others who had lived through the wars, but the distiller had seen so many he had become jaded against it, preferring to live in the sensation of the moment and forgetting the past, and the others who had lived through the war close to the monarch represented too much political danger for some kind of cathartic presence. And that left Lark, a veteran of the war before his, the war that led to his.

He shot the man a text before heading to the woods. It was such a fantastic technology, to be able to send thoughts and words across the void. He was comfortable with the technology, but it still reminded him of the wonder in the world some days.

The forest itself was a calming influence, the kind that he could rely on. It was home, the home he had been without for so long. He had grown up in the depths of woods wilder than these, came to manhood on their edges, and walked through destroyed forests with other soldiers, guns clutched close. There was a time and a place and this was always the place, where the fingers of civilization had failed to creep to and destroy everything that was beautiful about the natural and the wild.

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note: woot, old men and war
words: 817