Boy Blue // niall horan

Chapter 1

A MEMORY

Every bullet massaged my ears as the ballad was composed to end me. The melody sung by guns made a choir, desiring not to miss me. The gun metal shined and showed no preference as it flew straight through the men's hearts, applying and gifting warmth to the unlucky, causing their eyes to go blank.

My patriotic damp hands being kissed by sweat were now aching, reacting to pain by shaking; by betraying me- sheltering my face as I held my best friend against my chest. My best friend only wore metal, some calling him my rifle, but me naming him a knight.

My comrade next to me was a man who hung to the sky, as he was way taller in height than me. His skin had betrayed him, too, as it was as dark as the universe and his sweat resembled stars. His lips were the color of purple and his breath was tired, escaping from his wide nostrils.

I had memorized his pain; the kind of pain that feels like being hungry, yes, the kind of hunger that squeezes to the point where it stops being hunger and makes juices out of your stomach. Although he walked in the land of the free he was caged. And even though my skin was the color of jasmine rice I have understood the kind of shame his ancestors stitched on to his life.

I too understood how misplaced was his existence in this town, as I too don't call this country my home. My home is rather an ocean away, held hostage by Europe and man made poverty.

The sound of war was not kind and the cries of men was no symphony, but I only realized this once my head was engaged to reality, or my tombstone... Only my obituary was written by my beating heart, it is a song.

Fire was playing hide and seek like a child behind bushes and wild trees until my ears were buried under the sound that was the sonnet screaming- or more like singing- the word "retreat".

My dirty and bruised legs carried my body along with my panting, which was heavier than all of the weight in my body until I was far enough away from the explosion to be able to hold on to my breath properly. I was proud for never letting my pride convince me I was going to survive this war.

I was finding it hard if this battle had to do more with the physical adversities of individuals who promoted equality or the darkness of the slavery and war of my mind. I once read that those who fear men on earth are eternally damned, so I do not fear, but I am terrified. People from my county die from dependence of potatoes, but I have died from dependence of violence.

A bomb was set by the arm of the enemy on the ground I grasped onto, but I ran from my end to the point of being lost. I knew this surely well, as the silence was melancholically beautiful. The ache in my head disappeared like a ghost because I no longer heard the screams of the soldiers. This both pleasured and terrified me, as my head pounded against the cold Russian air leaving me dizzy because of the torturous noise, but I am alone. 

The silence was shot by many, too many, boots crushing floors and grounds or anything it could step on, as if the grass was the skull of the Jews or even Irish men like me. The sound of the thousands of boots nearly mutilated myself gorgeously to death, which both terrified and pleasured me, as I was no longer alone.

I ran away from both the possibility of death and the fear of ever giving the satisfaction to the enemy to fear them.

World  War II, they called it. The breeze whispered a memory, a memory that encouraged me to run through the wind and towards more trees and more flowers, blocking out and never glancing at the lifeless bodies laying around me- and I would say peacefully but I struggle to find anything 'peaceful' about war.

War, no matter how justified, will always be a crime.

In fact, so fast I ran that I met and individual I've never really been presented to before, a concussion. I laid on my stomach and everything lost it's color, fading and blurry, as I battled to keep my eyes open.

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A memory-
My grandmother sits on her adolescence and her rocking chair, swaying away at the memory like if the wood could release her.

"Grandma, what is war?"

I asked the question like the mold in that rocking chair would gasp and hide away from the words that escaped through the gap of my teeth

She shook the question off for a cracked solid second, as if a tornado formed and swept away the concentration of her face, but the answer was slow unlike the storm that formed in her eyes.

"well dear boy, war is where monsters and cowards make love".

I wondered afterwards if love was created in a gun factory or if it was designed as big as a bullet was, and even when I did not understand why monsters and men had the sick need to give love or take it away, I let the question torment her no longer.