When the World Goes Quiet

by Gian Sardar

“Imagine Emiel coming home after all these years and you’re dead, right at the end. A bullet kills at the end of the war the same way it does at the start.”

There’s comfort in believing our loved ones are still around us.

We shouldn’t be thankful we’ve survived; we should be angry we’ve not lived.

Emiel. His name barges back into her thoughts, along with the night, a year ago, when she was hit with the feeling that he was dead.

“You were careless. You looked up and down the street but didn’t look across the street.

Consider it pure joy whenever you face the trials of many kinds, Leona used to quote, because you know that the testing of your faith produces perseverance. But Leona never saw this world.

You see the shape of the road you took and you’re grateful for every twist and turn, because it led to where you are. Cause and effect or fate, it doesn’t matter what you call it,

how much depends on not just who tells the story, but on when the story starts, because life is layered upon life, and nothing is simple. Fluctuations and faults and lies that are a kindness. Green that is not grass and blue that is not sky. Ends that in fact could be beginnings.