WHEN DOES THE WAR END
I have been thinking a lot about wars. Especially soldiers and how they never return home the same persons who went to war, I think specifically about a character from a book I read when I was a teen, his name was Cody I had met him in the book earlier as a slightly troubled teen but nothing out of the ordinary. And then he joined the army and came back home an entirely different human, riddled with all these nightmares, anxiety and stuff. He was scary to me gone was the character I could relate to and in his place was this scary person who had survived a war but somehow was still deeply at war.
Very much like soldiers, my body has been at alert for years now, but this month we had to go to war- I had to have another surgery. But the pain of the surgery is sincerely the smallest part of my pain from this month.
My friend in the army once described the pain of watching his friend die in training camp, I remember him saying “People were watching. It was a simulation, not the real event and no one helped” I understood him very well. Because the thing about deeply hurtful events like wars would be the tiny missed details, the poor communication, the blatant disregard, carelessness e.t.c.
Get Kehinde Busayo’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
Like any soldier I was alert, I watched signs in my body and noted them, I could give dates and months and the exact feelings I had, the exact symptoms I had and every single pain I felt. If I felt one doctor wasn’t listening well I moved to another and made it crystal clear that I had seen others and would tell them exactly what what had been said. But somehow I still ended up needing urgent surgery and truthfully I’m physically healing well. The war in my body is wrapping up.
But like Cody, the war in my mind is raging terribly. I find it hard to recognize myself most days, joy feels a little distant, anxiety tries to hover, my body feels weird, my mind keeps going off and most days I don’t even realize until someone taps me, my heart doesn’t feel like it used to, I find myself wanting to disappear, sleep is hard- nightmares are so many. There is simply way too much going on, yesterday I was trying to walk and I simply couldn’t muster the speed I usually walk with. I feel deeply separate from myself; it is like watching myself in the third person some days.
Wars are very interesting because when they begin, you never really know when they would end and when the physical war ends, somehow the mind continues when the physical Landmines and missiles are withdrawn. The one in the mind remains, and sometimes long after the physical war has ended you wake up and you trip over a landmine in the battlefield of your mind and the question comes has the war truly ended if your mind is still this rattled?
Honestly, healing is a warfare and like every other war there is no fixed end date, so I know that one day hopefully soon I’ll wake up and I wouldn’t feel like I felt today. I know that one day, there would be no more landmines and missiles in my mind again but until that day, any-day I wake up struggling i’ll encourage myself, and remind myself that every war has an end.
But if we had to give an end date to a war, does it end when the body comes back to itself or does it end when the mind returns to hope? Really when does the war end?
