Imagine to Remember

The world has been ending since it began. The prophesied times are coming to pass, because we are here. Wars and rumours of wars, the slaughter of innocents. Everyday is an end and everyday is a beginning. At this very moment lives are falling to pieces, mothers and fathers holding limp, cold, heavy flesh, bodies that were once children. The sky rains fire instead of water. Crashing, collapsing, buckling under the weight of an unearthly evil. I have not seen war but I am its child, I escaped very narrowly what many did not. All the forces, big and small; push a button, draw a line, seismic shifts, nations split asunder, shaping our lives, and the lives of those yet to be born. Men in suits a world away, men who look like us but they are no better, making games out of our lives. I know, I have seen what survives the blast, after the takers take, and those who can leave, leave. Not just crumbling buildings, machine guns hanging on scrawny shoulders, checkpoint after checkpoint but I see how it lives. I’ve seen hungry eyes, and heard creaky voices, observed tense muscles and absent minds. I have seen their weariness and also their persistence, their resistance. I know the children suffer the most and I know it never leaves them. Every horror imaginable, ones I cannot bring myself to repeat to you, they tell me. Cities littered with limbs. Do you know the sound a body makes when it breaks? A bullet in the head would have been more merciful. But this is not the worst of it, they tell me, they are blessed they have been spared they tell me, because there is worse still and they tell me what it looks like, what they saw, and what they heard, what they escaped. What could have been, close calls, thinner than a hair separating life and death, and worse than death. Stories are passed on, crisscrossing the world several times over, a friend of a friend’s cousin, sister’s brother’s wife’s teacher’s neighbour tells me…