Goodbyes. They've always been hard for me. Even harder when you're saying it to the one you love the most; it kills you inside.
A letter came through my door on the Thursday morning confirming that all the men -over sixteen- in our country had to go and fight in the war. No one knew why but everybody seemed so honoured and proud to leave. Me on the other hand, I wasn't so happy about it. I was devastated that I would have to leave my mother, sister and wife. It killed me inside. When you find out that you may never see them again, there's a series of thoughts that run through your head. One being that they could forget who you are, years after you die. It's impossible to imagine what death is like. I don't want to die in war; I want to die with people I love, not people I barely know. Another one of these thoughts is that I could come home alive, but have the death of hundreds of innocent men on my conscience.
Innocence. That's the word that kept cropping up in my head. I'm not sure why but it could be the fact that every single man going will be young and naïve -just like me- and will come back, stripped if any innocence they had.
My mother was the last person I said goodbye to because I wanted her words to replay through my head through any bad time I had. That would be the entirety of the war. I wanted to remember her hug, how tight it was and how loving she was to me. When I hugged her for the last time, I made it last as long as I could. I never knew it would be this hard. But I guess there's always going to be pain in goodbyes.
