Aurora 2024

Madeline Davis

JOURNAL,

I feel that every time we co-exist, for lack of a better description, I am reliving some of my worst nightmares. That can’t be fair, as I started this journal as a way to document my terrors. They are getting more frequent, now that I think about it. I find myself going back to those memories, convincing myself that it ended in a much different way than the reality at hand. Perhaps I did not protect them each as I should have, perhaps they are lost in the hereafter with no way home and perhaps I have damned them to such a fate because I was cowardly. Yes, I followed orders, but I did not serve as I should have. Now, because of it, I am suffering greatly, greater than I ever thought possible. I killed several men in the war, so many men that if I were to name them all, this entry would be longer than the very war I am haunted by. They were all young, and what if they were as innocent as I was, and what if they had their own sparkles in their eyes that I ripped from them? What if I am the villain in their story, and my suffering is derived from my own brutality during the war? I know this all must seem redundant, I tell myself this every time I think of it. That it is redundant and it doesn’t do anyone any good, especially not myself. I agonize and I suffer, is it all self-inflicted? I could ask “What have I done to deserve this?” But I know. I know and that is why I cannot move past it.

A different superior of mine was Edward; he was a fiend

29