I BECOME NOTHING

 

I ask how soon I will become nothing. When my sentiments tear me apart and bounce around my head like cannon balls from a faded war. I want to know so much more than what I’ve learnt in my forty years on this screwed up world, yes people do matter. If they didn’t, there would be no humanity, would there.

 

I want to go to Auschwitz and see where a million died. I want to know how it feels. Will my sense of humanity fail and will I understand why the Nazi’s murdered so many people, indiscriminately? Will I grow even smaller within myself, one more step towards nothing? What part of me will I leave behind at Auschwitz? Will it be my toes, my fingers, my toes or my soul or none of those?

 

I want to go with a certain girl I know. She can’t see, you see but she is one amazing lady, something very bravely poignant about walking amongst pure evil with a blind girl. Step by step, hand in hand, in Auschwitz.

 

I want to visit Normandy and see where the Allies liberated Europe from Hitler’s tyranny. And see the beaches where the surf turned red under German bullets. How close did the good guys come to losing? What part of me will I leave on Normandy beaches? My brain or my heart? A price paid, by me, for that trip. I’m a step closer to becoming nothing.

 

Then I’ll stop off at Flanders and see where Allied and German youth where bled white, the flowers of a generation lost forever in some stupid War to End All Wars. How wrong they were. Will my tears fall where the blood of Tommie and The Hun fell, cut apart where they lay? Not even their mothers’ knew how or where their sons died. Did they know why? What part of me will I forsake for the dead of World War One? Let their ghosts tell me.

 

I ask a lady who I haven’t met, yet, to take me to West Germany. Let us cross the border and go to Leipzig, to see where pretty Karin Ulbricht was taken on that dark unstable dangerous night when she demonstrated against her country’s leaders’ Cold War madness.

 

Wouldn’t it be memorable for me, if Karin showed me her country where she made Cold War history? She was a gentle warrior of those dark evil poisoned days before The Wall fell. Did she know that one single gunshot would have changed world history forever, when she demonstrated that autumn night? If thousands had been killed by East German soldiers, would the Cold War be over now? Is she still as pretty today, over two decades later? My letter to her remains unanswered. What part of me would die in Cold War Germany? What if I run out of sentiments?

 

Save me from Karin, take me to Afghan where young Tommies are dying by IED and insurgent terrorist fire. Are their deaths justified and saving us from terrorists? My views on this illegal war are not nice; surely there must be a better way? So no more young ladies find out on Facebook that their precious soldier love is dead? The soldiers I have met over the last few years were brave souls, I prey they’re all untouched. I don’t need to go to Afghan to have a part of me die, but I would if I could to see with my own eyes and write about it. More of me fading away to nothing, again I ask, how soon till I become nothing?

 

To all of the soldiers, to the innocent and even the guilty, who have perished in Mankind’s wars, I am sorry for your deaths. Why do I feel like this? Is there another way? I’d ask the Christian God but I know He tells lies. Now I know now what silence sounds like, it’s the sound of a woman’s weeping where her son, brother and husband, perished. Are they proud, do they smile when they think of what could have been? So many lost years? For what exactly? I’d forsake every part of me, to become nothing, to stop the wars. For that thought, I am a fool and ask for the impossible.