The bleak kamikaze planes fly over a sunburned horizon line. I can only see the gunpowder, but no longer can I hear the noises of the explosions. The sky is stained crimson red and flashed of stark black Japanese planes dart in and out of the clouds. All of our lands majestic qualities are now lost, thrown out like garbage. The streets are lined with dead bodies, and the stench of death hangs over the town like a cloud of heavy fog. Tension is everywhere, even the cockroaches sense it. My face is sweating and the hair on the back of my neck is prickling my skin like porcupine needles. I’m waiting all alone in a dank alley and the thought of being alone forever has just dawned on me. Will I ever see another walking human being again or will my carcass be the last one to break down into the earth?

I sit still as an icicle freezing on a sinister December morning; waiting. The sounds echo in my eardrums as the soldiers who are lucky enough to be alive yell at one another. There voices are almost lost in the vast clouds of smoke, rubble, and forts of the dead. I’m the only one not crying, I can hear the shrieks and shudders of mothers without their children, brothers without their sisters, and wives without their husbands. But I sit in the silence of my own mind, wishing to feel the same way. Numbness overcomes me; the rest of the world is darting past me as I stand at an open widow into my mind. Will my life ever be able to rebuild the relationships that these fatal minutes have erased or will I forever carry the burden of death on my shoulders?

My shoulders ache and a sharp shooting pain continues to grow like a thorn bush sprouting out of the dry desert ground where my heart once sat. The deep pit of solitude pushes my longings aside and all I can feel is nothing. The bombs are still rapidly plummeting from the sky and the gunshots are being awakened from the once rusty weapons like bears stirring from a long winter hibernation.