□Prologue□



It is both a blessing and a curse to feel everything so deeply

~Anonymous

Silence.

It remains stagnant in the air.

Hovering.

The bitter scent overwhelming my senses with deafening silence will forever be a door to a nightmare that revisits my consciousness every time the night goes dark.

I remember the tears glistening in my mother's eyes when the white envelope stamped with a golden sparrow , left discarded on our front door mat , arrived a sign that my father had simply become another casualty in a trivial war that was damned to achieve nothing else but death.

I watched my mother wither to nothing but an existing soul . Although she hanged on to the burning rope of an empty life for the sake of my innocence I could still hear her hopeless cries in the night screaming through the silence .

My fathers remains were never recovered and the only evidence that he ever was - lost with him.I only became aware of the reasons my mother threw everything that was him in flames when I was confronted with the effects his death had on her .She did not need to have a reminder to add to her grief.

She was unaware that I knew about her frequent yet secret visits to my father’s burial stone.I had refused to be bought anywhere near stone because to me it was exactly that a stone. I was angry that I was expected to find healing in it when they had left my father’s spirit wandering and lost in the middle of a battle field. He was father but the country he was just another soldier lost.

My mother began to wither akin to garden during winter and she eventually allowed for her being to be succumbed by death for her very roots to dry up never to blossom again.

And as for me.

I took it upon me to not let their passing be a confinement between me and the life I knew my father would have wanted for me.

I try with my very being to hold myself together

But in the night when no one is lingering in the shadows the tears fall an my soul remains broken.

I thought I would remain shattered

Bearing a broken heart

But that was before ...

him

~

Amberia