A cloth is finite.

Limited. It is bought, used, then discarded. Eventually the fibres will fray, the colour will drain, and the punching holes within its fabric render it’s purpose useless.

Our people were worn out. And their resilience had waned from a scream to a whisper.

War does that to you.

At least, it did to them.

I already know they are dead. I attended the funeral, listened to the priest give his kind words about the family as I fumed in the chair, feeling a helplessness unlike any kind of futility I’ve ever felt before.

But I still had the key to the house. A place I had desperately wanted to visit, but the relentless road of corporate city life demands never permitted me the time to do so.

I step up to the door, insert the key, and press open the door.

It opens without any resistance, the internal locks already broken apart however many months ago. Nothing of my childhood remains; the rustic smells replaced by an arid ash laiden aroma, the wooden floor cracked apart and fractured, the kitchen panes splintered and torn to shreds.

The living room wasn’t even intact, a gaping hole in the wall leading outside to the rest of the ruins outside.

It is as I figured.

Nothing about this place feels like home anymore.

For one reason or another, tears form in my eyes. I will never have the childhood nostalgia I once dreamed of, to visit my parents old and elderly to proudly present them with their grandkids.

I’ll never see my past in the same way ever again.

And after really digesting that revelation, something on an intensely deep and spiritual level broke inside my soul.