How awful it is to love.
How awful it is that all the things we love must die.
My hands tremble, shiver, shake — not only with anger, but with ache. I am no god; I cannot rain down plagues and arrows on the evil and the inevitability that you will be taken away. I wield no spear, nor do I wear any such armor, for all that I don is ache.
I am not told in any epic, nor is there a Muse to sing of my rage. But my body, this sickly sum of skin and bones, tells a tale of its own. My eyes, gray and fogged, once beheld the color of the other half of my soul. The spaces between my fingers are a taunt — a vile reminder of the greater grief of a mortal left wandering in an earth when another is gone.
Before darkness consumed my vision, before these bones thinned into twigs, what strung me together was the love of another. Through the shriek of the warplanes raining death tolls, the tragedy of a home reduced to rubble and the metallic tang of bloodshed, I held on to your limbs. An anchor. A moment of stability amidst volatility. But no grip could ever be firm enough to hold you forever in a world where life becomes a cruel game of dice — where you only survive if you are lucky enough to evade the bombshells.
In such an unsparing world, I find it hard to believe in wishes upon shooting stars. The sky does not cry, for it bleeds. But despite it all, I wish, I pray, I scream. For that is all that I can do.
How can I recognize you by touch when your fingers have long gone cold? How can I remember you by your smell when it is the stench of war and death that hangs in the air? I would know you in death, at the end of the world — but when you died, all that was beautiful and bright was buried with you.
When the bombs came, as though in a footrace towards inhumanity, so many around us were buried too.
If I was a god, I would do this, and this, and this. I would be a merciful god, unlike the ones told in myths, and unlike the ones sat in presidential seats. I would fight for peace and justice, handpicking missiles and transfiguring them into shooting stars, so that one day, people may remember to wish again. And as my final act of love, I would paint you in the skies as a constellation that shines as a faint glimmer of hope.
But I can’t love you like the gods did. I can only lament — how awfully human it is to love.
