αвrαhαm (abjectissime) wrote in cirque_rp, @ 2017-12-19 16:14:00 |
|
|||
On his shoulders, the weight of so much more than just his back seemed to try to pull him down and underneath the ground felt as if it were trying to accept him. Each step felt harder to take, but he pushed ahead because he could not go back. Abraham felt there were a lot of things that he could not go back to and that was a crushing realization. His stupid, cowardly nature and his horrible desire to sacrifice his own happiness led him here, to this European theater of a monstrous war. There was blood on his hands now and a heaviness in his chest that he would never be able to escape but all of that was only compounded by his regret over the life he abandoned, over the people he had abandoned. Abraham hadn’t told anyone he was going to join the war effort until he received his notice to report for training. It had arrived in a pristine beige envelope, his name and his to-be division emblazoned over his address. He had known it would be coming any day now and he had taken to religiously checking the mail before anyone else could, determined to keep this horrible secret to himself for as long as he could manage. Keeping it from his family had been deceptively easy; since moving away from them and into a place of his own, he no longer felt entirely compelled to share with them every detail of his life. However, there was one person he was withholding the truth from with whom he had always made it a point to be honest. Lying to him had been so much harder, but every time he thought he was going to break, he reminded himself why he needed to do this. The rumors had started up again and he was terrified imagining how much they could ruin if they ran rampant. The lives of everyone he cared about, the person he loved, could be ruined or worse, ended. Abraham did not want their futures stained if he could fix it and fix it he did in the only way that he could. His decision was extreme, but it felt like the only option. More than anything, he knew that he wouldn’t have been able to walk away from him again like he had before, and that meant he needed something to take him far, far away where the rumors could not touch them and wither away. And so, on a cold morning in February of 1941, Abraham finally got the notice that summoned him away from his home. In a week’s time, he was to report to the recruitment office for registration and transportation to the training facility in Fort Meade, Maryland. Those six days had been the hardest to endure but on the seventh day, just before he left the house with his pack bag, he left the notice on the table. Abraham didn’t even have the courage to tell him face to face and that will always be something he will regret. Training had been gruelling, but Abraham was determined to push forward and worked well into the nights and started impossibly early in the mornings. Some of these men had been made for war, grizzled and hard-hearted and Abraham clearly was not. His greatest advantage was an intimate familiarity with the weapons they had been trained with as he had, at one time, been a part of the factory line that built them. A little over a year later, Abraham was boarding the legendary RMS Queen Mary who would take them across the Atlantic to England. His time there was unsensational, a combination of training, drills, and fortification that left him with a false sense of security. The war still seemed so far away, so unreal to him, but that changed in June of 1944 when he and the rest of his division took part in the invasion of Omaha Beach in Normandy. The first landing vehicles touched the beach and even from a distance, Abraham could see the carnage in such morbid detail. Blood swirled in the angry waves, broken up by dark shapes that became bodies as the water tossed them over. All of his body ran cold and numb, his senses overwhelmed by the smell of iron and salt and gunpowder, by the sound of automatic rifles and anti-tank weaponry and the shrill sound of metal being ripped apart at high velocities. Abraham also remembered the sound of bodies falling to the sand. When they landed, once again he pushed forward, fuelled by something he couldn’t define. Their victory was hard won and they pushed forward through France, Abraham’s once-clean hands now forever stained with blood and his light heart weighed down just a little more. The war had become real and it had slapped him in the face. En route to Saint-Lô, Abraham had his arm looked at after it was sliced open by a stray bullet. He had gotten lucky, he knew. While crossing that beach, he had seen men he grew to know gunned down and left bleeding on the beach. There was chaos and horror and fear and you could not stop unless you wanted to succumb to it. Shifting his bag on his shoulders, Abraham could finally see their destination looming up before them. It might have been pretty, once upon a time, but everything had taken on the grey of gunmetal it seemed, as if his eyes were coated with a film of smoke that colored the world around him. They were assigned their orders, and Abraham took to the building they had been directed towards and settled himself in the large first floor room, pressed against a wall away from the main avenue. Night fell, casting a darkness over the town, and silence fell with it. Lit by a few flames, the room flickered as if alive and Abraham sat quietly, reviewing the stack of letters he had wrapped carefully in the shirt he had worn the day he left home. The smell of his Connecticut house, of him, had long since faded away, replaced by the scent of war, but there were times he could swear it still held traces of those old memories. In his calloused hands, each letter felt as if it weighed one hundred pounds and he held them with a reverence that would have been blasphemous had he been a religious man. He touched them gingerly as though the paper could crumble to nothingness in his hands. For a long time, he only looked at the script on the outside, the pen strokes that came together to form his name, the letters having grown shakier over time. Seeing that was enough to rend his heart, moved him to pen responses of his own but his letters were never sent. Tucked away in order were all the responses he never mailed, all the promises and apologies and declarations he was too afraid to make real. Neat and unopened was the newest letter from home and with careful yet trembling fingers, Abraham peeled the envelope open to free its contents. The paper was marred, the ink having ran in some places, and he touched the rippled circles where tears had fallen and dried. Abraham was careful to hold the letter far enough away that any stray tears of his own wouldn’t fall and ruin the letter any further, and he read and reread its contents over and over again. The guilt bubbled up in his throat again and lodged itself there, choking him, but he dare not open his mouth to let it out. The rest of the men left inside were either asleep or absorbed in their own business, and Abraham had learned months ago not to show weakness out here. Abraham reached into his back once again and produced a cheap pen nearly run out of ink and a sheet of paper, and using the a metal ammunition box as a desk, began to write a response. He must have tried to start a million times, and the sound of his pocket watch ticking away reminded him that his time was limited. Soon, he would have to abandon this corner to begin his shift outside and he would lose this quiet opportunity. Each day was unpredictable, a quiet night meant nothing out here. The Germans were closing in, and they were closing in on them, and it was only a matter of time before they collided once again. Abraham was afraid but he had made it this far. He would be able to keep going. With time quickly starting to elude him, Abraham took a deep breath and released it in a solemn sigh. In a thousand different ways, I have used up all the ink I had been given trying to find the right way to apologize to you. There isn’t a way in any language to really say it, I’ve found, and it’s not for lack of trying. My limited vocabulary can’t find the words I need, and so I’ve filled pages with empty approximations to what I feel and I could fill thousands more and still never quite convey it with any genuine exactness. Delicately, Abraham folded the letter and slipped it inside the stationary he had purchased back in England. It was nondescript but pretty in its pristineness, and he sealed and addressed the letter like he had all the ones before. And just like all the others, he placed it in chronological order after its pair and wrapped them all back up in the old shirt before tucking it all away inside his pack. He stood then, feeling his bones and muscles protest and he slung his rifle over his shoulder and tucked his pistol away. Abraham adjusted his helmet as he had been taught and he stepped outside. As the change of shift began, a cry of alarm rang out and a gunshot broke the pervasive silence that had lulled everyone into a rapidly crumbling sense of security. In the distance, Abraham caught a flash of a uniform and was able to recognize it as German as they scrambled into position. The sun slowly began to creep up over the horizon and the light of day splashed across Saint-Lô, bathing it in orange and red. The bombed landscape seemed to glow as if on fire, almost picturesque in the most macabre of ways. Abraham stepped past some debris, catching himself when he became stuck on a loose patch. The man behind him had not been as lucky and he stopped to help free his compatriot as another volley of shots rang through the air. For a second, the world seemed to stop. The sun froze in its ascent, and hung like a brilliant ornament. Abraham was acutely aware of a feeling of drowning despite being firmly with two feet on land. Never in his life had he ever had a fear of death, had never spared a thought for that dire inevitability, and now it crept up on him like the waves in Normandy and yet it arrived quietly. Death came to him accompanied by cold and silence, filled him with a pain he had never known and a sense of weightlessness. It was the first time he had felt so light since he had been deployed and it was as deceptive as the light that glowed at the edges of his vision. He coughed, sputtering blood across the uniform of the soldier who was cradling him. Abraham could see he was calling for the medic but he couldn’t hear his voice. No sound seemed to reach him, only the rapid sound of his own heart rang loudly in his ears though in his chest, it burned. No oxygen was reaching his lungs, only the blood he couldn’t help but swallow in between gagging coughs as he gasped for air. Abraham became acutely aware of the letters pressed against the small of his back and his bloody fingers wrapped around the wrist of the hand putting pressure on his neck. He tried to choke out a word but nothing came. As his eyes closed, he thought of him, sitting at the kitchen table reading the newspaper with a cup of coffee rapidly growing cold in the drafty room. |