The Blood & The Bones

You came back every time still at war. Still torn between duty, home, honor and me.

Still hoping for a reason to go again and still searching for meaning.

Do I not honor you?

I have loved. I have sacrificed. I have waited.

All for that honor.

But I am not the war you want.

I’m the one you run away from.

It took too much time to realize that looking at me brings guilt back to the battlefield when you thought that part of you was numb. It reminds you of all you missed. Of who you were. Of who you’ve become.

And when you’re here you’re just a visitor.

You walk down the hall of photographs

And feel what?

Like you’re looking at someone else’s life, someone else’s eyes in mine always having forgotten about a look that asks for something. About a touch that knows the man you’ve been.

And so you go to her. You go where you can hide. Where guilt can’t go until the drive home. And somehow you blame me for that too.

You’re not a devil. You’re just lost. And you don’t remember what home was really like. You ask yourself what is home anymore when you’re war torn? When you live half your life missing what’s waiting, but forgetting how to be a man of honor here too. A man who needs the adrenaline of purpose, but only the kind that comes with cold metal his hands. Where you can die for someone else’s family not just your own.

A man who forgets what it’s like to live on this side where love is not just in a letter, a screen or a memory. Where you must be apart of it. Not just a witness.

Where love is not a rotation but a human being.

I am here. I am real.

But you’re focused on what you traded, what you lost, what you give away when you are gone.

And all these pictures on the wall of a life you missed even when you were present for it. That’s your face in every photo but you don’t recognize it.

I mourn for you.

You mourn for the version of us you’ll never know and the man you were before they called you back.

I grieve for him too, the version that died in that desert. I have come to terms with the fact that he is gone.

But you’re not a devil. You’re just a man who forgot his way home.

the blood

& the bones