When the World Goes Quiet

by Gian Sardar

There is nothing worse than silence, in a moment after. Ask a woman who’s just given birth. Ask a father who saw a wagon tip and is running, calling out names. Ask a daughter whose mother didn’t make it into the shelter, because of her. Silence screams loudest of all.

Cobblestones and brick. Moss and violets. Bruges used to be a dreamer’s city, with daffodils and tulips in window boxes and weeping willows whose boughs skimmed the water of the canals that vein the city. A fairy-tale land of medieval buildings and winding narrow roads, as well as shimmering water and bridges where couples stood to cast wishes into the air, the reflection below them a glossy, inverted world of red-tile rooftops and trees and white clouds scattered in cornflower-blue skies.

A bullet kills at the end of the war the same way it does at the start.

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

They’ve taken too much already—don’t give them more by blaming yourself. Be angry, not guilty.”

Theirs was a world of slow realizations and gradual understanding.

But the need to be right—to insist you are right—has caused more problems in the world than actually being wrong.

“Fate is a crutch. You can’t feel wrong if you think what you’re doing is fated. Where’s the importance of choice? Where’s your moral responsibility?”

“You might take comfort in this, and you might not, but life is repetitive. Maybe it’s the journey humans need. But every so often, a war or a plague or what have you. A hundred years pass, and our streets look different, so different that we think we’re nothing like the people who came before us. Our situations, our circumstances, they’re all new. They must be, we think, because we’re so different. We want to be different. But at the core, everything’s the same. A hundred years ago, two hundred years ago. The same lessons learned differently. And no matter when it is, you can guarantee something’s waiting in the wings to make us feel broken, but more importantly, to force us to find a way through.”

time will file down the sharp edges of her errors,

Maybe the real casualty of war is right and wrong. Even the belief that there is a right and wrong.

What is it to be a mother, who knows that to save her child, she must lose her? To have the greatest gift be a future you will never be a part of? A future without, but because.

And she smiles, and thinks once more of 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.