The blood that leached off my body was the exact same shade of the flowers I laid upon; it stained the fragile, wilted petals.

My comrades fought nearby, but they were fighting a war which was never theirs to fight. Their desperate cries for justice had gone unheard, for this wasn’t a war for justice, it was a war for bloodshed. It was murder, pathetically cloaked under the empty promises of peace…alas if the world wasn’t corrupted, filled with greed, tyranny, famine and poverty.

The delicate summer breeze brought with it not only an end to my pain, but rich charcoal-grey clouds, who rumbled, preparing to bid me farewell. The damp grass swayed, and bumblebees buzzed away.

Crack. I was shot. Panic wove its cold fingers around my neck, instantly causing a block in my airflow. My vision blurred. Jack had propped me on his shoulder and limped towards the meadow. He eerily muttered under his breath, forehead creased. He looked old. And paranoid. War does that to you, having to second guess your every move, having a constant reminder that each breath could be your last…I could hear his laboured pants.

People fought, people died.

He laid me down; it seemed he could see, it seemed that he knew I was alone. As alone as the day I was born. He proudly marched towards his end, into death’s open arms, but he left beholden to nothing and nobody. He glanced back—our eyes conversed in languages beyond the wits of our mind. He left me in solitude.

“…Solitude”, I thought as the rain washed over me. The earth grieved, the skies wailed, lightning danced around the sky—it mocked every atom of my disintegrating body. The rain washed me clean, clean of all my sins and grief. As death began to consume me, I turned an eye above and cried, “Love, love.”

The steady pitter-patter echoed the muffled drum of a funeral procession.

***

A thick layer of snow covered the remains of my body; scents of the freshly showered earth were merely a distant memory. I died fighting, but here, suspended in time, I had finally surrendered.