Aurora 2024

Madeline Davis

bleeding out.

I shall write again. V.C

JOURNAL,

By now, I consider you to be closer than even my favorite family members. I have told you things that I both wish never to relive and thought I would never live to tell another soul. That is why perhaps, I feel so much relief when I tell you these things. I was a very different person before the war, this is a fact to everyone and I am not proud of it. I did so many awful things that it is hard to associate with who I once was, to who I became, and now the broken and bloody remains of the present. I enjoyed many things in my youth, superficial things I suppose, but I did love them. Yet I cannot recall any of them for the life of me. Who was I? Who was I really? Did I exist as an extension of my family? What did I value, and why did I value it? Who could I have become if I hadn’t been in the war? I am empty, so much in the sense that I may never be whole again. This neither angers nor terrifies me. I feel nothing, but perhaps a sense of longing for what could’ve been. I do often wonder, do I feel my emotions in an authentic way or perhaps it comes to me in a cheap diluted manner?

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