|
When War Arrived by Oswaldo Perez Cabrera
|
|
When war arrived I was already resigned to die. Tired of fighting against
and for dead ideals; tired of the indifference of people who only get
worried about the world when something disastrous happens in their houses,
and then they want to change it and they want everybody to look at their
disgrace. I am resigned to see what there is on the other side of life.
When war arrived I was tired of waiting and praying to a deaf energy. That
tiredness that beheads the soul and makes it hyperactive. Your body
produces a substance that heats you up inside. First, it produces anxiety
and rage. Impotence overpowers you and you want to escape to another
country. You feel trapped, chased, hunted, you don’t know what to do and
then you are resigned. You think that destiny will handle things and what
is the point in fighting wars that are not yours and even if they were,
what is the point in fighting a war for more power? What is the point of
escaping from war? Until when are you going to run? Until they reach you
in a different country. Even before war arrived, I saw children fighting
in these estranged wars and I realized how rotten the system is and I
questioned, why should we stay in this gloomy world? Then you realize that
the real hell is in this life; sometimes I think that maybe I died and
this is my punishment. That is why I decided to wait for war without any
hurries or fears, without any taboos or mercies; the war came to show us
what the human with a blind soul is capable of doing. In what moment my childhood became an antique... When the war arrived the sky dressed up in a reddish orange veil, it cried with tears of blood that were dripping from the clouds only to filtrate through the belligerent cracks and the slivered craters created by the human metal. When the war arrived I was smoking the roaches of bitterness standing at the foot of my gnawed door. The trees started to disintegrate, becoming toxic deserts. Sand transformed into diminutive weapons and the environment finished becoming hostile. Solitude began to eat up all the nearby towns where depending on which god is guarding you, you become an enemy or an ally. But at the end, the war will arrive for everybody, leaving nothing and no one left to govern. With war the apocalyptic winds arrived, obliterating everything. Peace, I will find at last. It just depends on how long it takes this immense cloud of dust that approaches at a storming speed and darkens everything in the middle of the day to get me. I see it coming nearer with a sonic sound that bursts my eardrums, my skin burns and a blast will leave my carbonized corpse like a sculpture of dust, one more monument for the stupidity of men. In what moment did our childhood become macabre? ___________________________ Oswaldo Perez Cabrera is a Mexican freelance writer living in Vancouver. He is the director of La Vanguardia de Vancouver, a monthly cultural publication. He is involved with the Vancouver Latin American Film Festival in September and hosts The Morning After Show at CITR 101.9 FM. He also believes Bush is a sort of dumb Antichrist.
|