Lieber O'Byrne

Lieber

The Journal is bound by leather, it has a small metal wolf head embedded in the cover.
On the very first page, a poetry stanza is written in neat hand writing, above the authors apparent signature and name.

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"Tell me not, in mournful numbers,
Life is but an empty dream!
For the soul is dead that slumbers,
And things are not what they seem."
- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, 'A Psalm of Life'

Lieber O'Byrne

My Journal

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  When I was ten, my Father gave me this journal. I loved it, it was rustic, leatherbound, and smelled like an old book. I promised him that all of my great adventures will be recorded here, in this dusty journal. I was so happy. But two weeks went by, and I just stared at it. I stared at this book, thinking 'What would I write?'. It had never crossed my mind that I would run out of space to write, since it was a large book. Two more weeks go by and it's still sitting in my backpack, the wolf head staring back at me, telling me to write.

  I told myself- or rather that wolf, that nothing interesting happened. No adventures, no battles, nothing. So, I left it there. It would sit in my backpack for a few more weeks, until I finally picked it up, got my set of pencils, and wrote my signature in the fanciest way I could. Lo'B. I placed it back in my backpack, and went to sleep. I started to worry about failing my father. I promised him that I would fill it up with great stories, yet It had been a month and a half, and I only managed my signature.

  The next morning after that, the scouting parties came back from a scavenging trip. They took it upon themselves to stop by the local library, borrowing a good amount of books. My Mother was a bookworm, so, I was a bookworm, funny how that works, huh? I was the first to know of the shipment of half-burnt books, and the first to look through them. The first one that caught my eye was 'Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Selected Poems' I picked it up, sitting down, reading through it. I was never too interested in poetry, I even thought that poems were dumb, girlish things. I have a different outlook on such things today.

  I knew the next thing I wanted to write in that journal. The first stanza of Longfellow's 'Psalm of Life'. After a day, I finished the book, and I went back to the books. I was now interested in poetry. I picked up another book of poems, by Rudyard Kipling. I read it all, I analyzed every single poem in my mind. I would live by a few, specifically 'A Psalm of Life' by Longfellow, and 'If' by Kipling.

  Fast forward ten years, I'm twenty. I'm still staring at that dusty old journal, wondering if I will ever fill an entire page. I was a soldier, though I'm not sure if soldiers are always men. I didn't feel like a man. I hold a shotgun and a pistol, tasked with scavenging food for the Blackthorns. But I still felt like a child. I didn't act childish, nor did I sound, walk, or look like a child, yet I was somehow sure that I was not yet a man.

  A few days after my 20th birthday, we were on the move. We were always on the move, of course, we had no set headquarters or base of operations, so we just moved and kept moving. My home was on the road. My home was broken into, as we were ambushed while moving to a new, safe place, where we could probably sleep. In the fray, my Father and Mother were both shot. I'm not sure if they are dead, and I would like to hope that they are alive. After the battle, me and a few other Blackthorn members were taken prisoner, and sent to a labor camp.

  I was the technical 'leader' of the camp resistance. I always cringed when people called it a resistance... How were we resisting? We couldn't resist, the only weapons we had were shanks and the occasional shillelagh. Last I checked, lead trumps wood. The idea of resisting was pointless, we could only prepare. And we did, and we hoped that one day we could be liberated by some other resistance group. In the Blackthorns we heard stories from London, of the larger resistance group there taking over the labor camps. We could only hope we were in London.