The silence was shattered by the piercing cries of bullets, slicing through the delicate veil of night and dew. The symphony of war—stripped of beauty, devoid of romance—echoed with the heavy footsteps of death’s relentless march. It moved without mercy, claiming both the guilty and the innocent, a force blind to virtue or sin. War’s apologists spoke of the fog of conflict, but we knew it as the scorching breath of a monstrous hunger, devouring everything in its path. Some were spit out. Many were swallowed—into grim depths from which no light returned.

As the mechanical chorus of battle took hold—mortars and grenades adding their deadly refrains—I felt myself dissolving into a state at once terrible and serene. In that moment, I became the sum of my history: a collapse and a rebirth, a fall and a rise. I was splintered and reassembled, divided and multiplied. I was death, and I was life. Perhaps this is the metamorphosis that occurs when one stands on death’s brink, gripped by the illusion of imminent rebirth.

The blood that spilled from my wounds felt like life’s final offering, my cries the agonized gasps of a soul slipping away. As I fell, it felt as if I were being dragged into an abyss—its encroaching darkness a cold, unyielding grip. In the chaos of war, I was consumed by death’s silent agony: the stark severing of life’s fragile thread, not with a promise of rebirth, but with the permanence of an eternal night.

© Beatriz Esmer