At the end

I wake up from the darkness. Something shines brightly into my eyes that I am blinded by it. I feel nauseous. I realize that I am lying on something very hard. I am lying on the ground. I am sweating. I am wholly covered in sweat and something else. Something thick, maybe blood.

My legs hurt and I cannot move them. I breathe hard. I breathe dust in the air. My throat is dry and parched. I need water. I try to get up. I cannot breathe, my body resists with a blinding pain and I feel like throwing up.

It is a bright sunny morning. The summer has made the sky cloudless. Down on earth, people are injured or dying from the blasts and bullets that flew between the two groups of people who barely knew each other, one in the typical green military uniform and the other in a similar but brown one. The barren vast expanse of land had been turned into a battlefield by the two armies by digging bunkers and building hurdles.

I am wearing the green uniform. I want to fall unconscious, I want to sleep. I remember being thrown away by something loud blasting near me. I slowly turn sideways. I use my right arm as a support to lift myself up. My arms touch the ground that was once dry and is now wet with blood. I slowly lift myself up to a sitting position and then look around me.

Not a living soul around me! An eerie pin drop silence around me that rings of death!!

I look towards my camp. There in a distance I can see our national flag standing tall but fallen down in the still air. I look at the other camp and I see their flag in the same position. Someone has to pull both of them down to bring them to a half mast position. Or someone has to replace one with the other to win over the other and end the war.

I look around me. No one but me.

Someone has to replace one with the other to win and end the war.

I have to replace the other one with my colors to win and end the war.

I have to stand up, walk to the other camp and do it. Put an end to the bloodshed. It is not patriotism that drives me. It is what I have been through, what I have witnessed that drives me. Those scenes are not to be replayed.

A surge of energy flows through my body and I start struggling to get up on my feet. My motivation to avoid a certain continuation of a series of killings and destruction helps me get up. I feel strong and a strange kind of happiness. I start to walk. I move ahead by a few steps. The heat is unbearable and I think I am losing blood. I drag myself. The camp is still at a distance and I got to make it there.

I am sweating profusely. I feel dizzy and the world around me is moving in circles. The light in front of me is dimming. And then my legs give away and I fall backwards.

My head has hit something hard. I think I have broken my skull. I feel wetness below my head. As I lay there with my eyes towards the sky, I see vultures flying high.

Strangely, it is not my life that is flashing in front of my eyes. I see those black spots circling the bright blue sky ready for a feast for no man will wander into these lands without his flag flying at the other end. They know that once the feast is over, the prey will itself present them with another one.

As my eyes slowly fall into darkness, I realize how I could have changed history but it seems history itself did not want to be changed. History wants more people to be killed, stories of heroic battles to be a part of it. I am but a small part of the many killed in these battles and many more to come.

At the end, the darkness creeps in and takes over completely. My story ends here to pave way for a new one.

-prmdbk