normal wasn’t something that anyone experienced anymore. In a world where nuclear war had taken away all of our normal had made our lives... horrifying. In fact, horrifying was the new normal. before war had taken over the world, everyone at least once would think of the world if there ever was an apocalypse. If you would survive, how you had to fight for every scrap of food. And yes, those things might be true, life is hard now, but not nearly as hard as we thought. Just the emotional trauma that the war had put everyone through made life way worse than fighting and killing. People couldn’t care less if they didn’t eat, because the things people have seen and the people they lost made surviving way worse. The suffering and mourning people went through killed people more than trying to survive. i remember when i lost my little brother. He was all i had. He was blown up by a bomb when the war had first started. It was terrifying and if it wasn’t for him i would be dead. Because I knew that alive or dead he would want me to survive. He was only ten years old. He was everything to me. We didn’t really have a good relationship with our mom so we had to stick together. That was two years ago when life was still normal. And it wasn’t until today when I’ve finally stopped mourning. i woke up and thought to myself, its life or death out here and if i keep on mourning his loss, he’s the one who will kill me. So, today was almost, normal. It was weird. Yes, war still went on and i still had to survive, but without the weight of him on my back, things seemed... better. i also knew that if he was here right now, he would tell me to stop thinking of his death, and instead to think of him as an angel, watching over and protecting me.