Please let me forget…

Another loud explosion ripped through the dusty city horizon, he held his legs tightly to his body while rocking himself back and forth repeating the words “please let me forget” like a mantra from the lips of an all-knowing guru. “Please let me forget, please let me forget, please let me…”

Buildings were now falling from the sky’s angular profile in a disarrayed ballet of smoke and metallic spires that threatened to bring the violence into a crescendo of peace and silence. “Please let me forget. Please let me forget.” His pleas to the heavens grew frantic. His back was smacking vehemently into a muddy brick wall the lay unceremoniously at a sloppy incline to give him support with every time his body rocked back in his attempt to cope with the carnage that lay around his feet.

The world was falling apart around him. He kept the destructive beat with every undulation of his speeding pulse, “1, 2, 3, CRASH. 1, 2, 3, SNAP.” His tiny body becoming a pendulous metronome as accompanying strings to the shallow base beat of cement blocks and chunks landing in random thuds into the moist artificial moss-type earth. The tune drew into his ears, the breeze that escaped his lips repeatedly swam by his body with every time he thrust himself forward in sad attempt to calm his ever-growing fear, the disturbing sounds of the ground being pounded by falling debris was heightened by that very breath. The fugitive breath that slipped through his tightly clenched lips, and the feeling as it slapped him in the face as it floated mockingly still in the thick so-called air which hung motionless like a sedentary cloud of oxygen, nitrogen, and bits of dust, poisonous gasses, or shrapnel depending on the last location of the most recent explosion.

“Please let me forget” he mumbled again while pushing his formerly blond bangs that were darkened by dust and debris that clung to the fright-sweaty tendrils. “Please let me forget.” His blue eyes tentatively opened to asses his surroundings, not really knowing what to expect and fearing his ignorance all the more. He let his arms slip from cradling himself by the knees which dropped from the under the gravitational pull of his heart sinking to his feet.

His eyes beheld a bleak world of alien architecture none dissimilar from what was once standing tall and proud, his world now ruined, smoke billowing out of the windows of surrounding houses that once were homes filled with laughter and not fire, partially charred bodies lay strewn into the streets like some morbid confetti, and the roads littered with enormous trunks once upright and reaching toward the artificial sun by its comparatively tiny finger-twigs. His hands stole away to cover his mouth as he began to taste the bile lurching weakly up his throat, as it was triggered by the smell of post mortem rot and decay that invaded his nostrils with stealth-like ease since he had long past stopped breathing from his nose. The acrid taste of ash from the burnt flesh, clothing, and dismembered houses under fire glued itself onto his tongue like a bad case of the pasties, never to be washed away, imprinted deep in his sensory memory.

Never in his young life had he thought that war could cause such horror. The calamity first hand… “Please let me forget”. The smell of human defecation and blood flooded over him, his life faded, his eyes grew dark… “I won’t need to forget.”