The Weight of Living

The Weight of Living

By VeteranWithAnEar

I wake up with your names on my lips
Familiar sounds, now hollow.
I carry your faces,
But your voices are fading,
Like a radio signal slowly lost to static.

You never got the chance to grow old,
To laugh at the jokes we never told,
To feel the weight of time settle in.
Instead, you’re forever frozen,
In that moment, the one I’m stuck in,
The one I can't outrun.

Some days I wake up and forget you’re gone,
And I think I can still hear you,
Calling my name across the barracks,
Or shouting from that shallow ditch.
But then I remember,
And the air feels colder,
Like I’m holding my breath, waiting for a punch
That never comes.

I look in the mirror,
And it’s not my reflection I see
It’s theirs, staring back at me.
I’m still here, still breathing,
But they’re not.

What did I do to deserve this?
To be the one who made it back
When they didn’t?
The question doesn’t have an answer,
Only the weight of it,
Like a backpack filled with sand,
That never quite lets up.

I wonder, on nights when the silence is too loud,
If it would have been easier
To switch places
To have them here,
To give them the chance to feel the sun again,
To hug their kids,
To stand beside their brothers and sisters,
To live.
I’d take the burden of their absence
If it meant they could come back.

But I can’t change it.
I can’t bring them back.
So I keep walking.
One foot in front of the other,
Even when it feels like I’m dragging the weight of them,
Like I’m carrying them inside of me,
Everywhere I go.

Some days, I wonder how much longer I can keep walking
How much longer I can carry this
Without breaking.
But then I hear them, in my mind
The ones who would have kept going,
The ones who never stopped,
Even when the world around them fell apart.
They'd want me to keep going too.

So I keep walking.
One step.
And then another.
Because if I stop,
I’ll be left with the silence.
And the silence,
That’s where I’ll lose them for good.