PEACE

Once peace returned in rich countries, and normal stock market trading resumed, the world completely forgot the real reason for the conflict: to defend democracy. In a world where money was much more valuable than life or human dignity, mankind had learnt all the tricks to achieve their goal: to become richer and defend their spoils.

For me who had grown up connected to the earth like a close relative, I had never completely lost myself in the virtual world like most young people my age. I couldn't find my identity anywhere, neither in social media nor in the films of the advanced and modern world. I was approaching forty years-old, and I was rich in life experiences, each more real and vivid than the other. To me, the virtual world seemed bland and boring in comparison. But I still felt very empty and dead inside despite the fire still alive within me; the same fire that died from time to time in my teenage years that Alegria knew how to rekindle. I often called her just to hear her voice and her laughter. But it wasn't the same without my feet on my grandmother's land.

With peace after three years of war, I tried to find in my military career a new meaning in my existence. I was seeking the consolations that only a sincere and deep relationship with myself could provide. I still wasn't brave enough. I was still overwhelmed by guilt and shame. True peace in men's world never comes alone, it is always accompanied by inner peace. Alegria used to say that only unhappy people willingly make other people unhappy. Happy people are too busy enjoying their short moments of joy because they know that happy times are always fleeting in men's world. The lessons of wisdom learnt from Alegria and some parables from my Catechism lessons often came back to me in my darkest moments. They reminded me that I wasn't the only one walking through those dark corridors. Others before me had also taken them, and they had come out alive to talk about it.

I sometimes resented my father for not keeping me with him, my mother and my sisters. I felt forever incomplete, amputated from limbs essential for my development as a man. Maybe, I was like that precisely because of this separation. I wanted a father and a mother in one and same person at the same time. Of course, it made no sense, but for a soul in pain, sense isn't what the soul is looking for in its reflection. All it ever wants is even more pain.

In those moments, I wished so much I could do like most people of my generation, go through suffering in the company of alcohol, food, technology or lust, numbing the pain for a short while. Unfortunately, or rather fortunately, my childhood and my existence of exiles and discipline had trained me to take suffering in its raw and natural form. I had become acquainted with it so much that we were familiar with each other like old friends. I was no longer afraid of it because I knew that after so many years, if its goal had ever been to finish me off, I would have been dead a long time ago. Obviously, it wanted me alive so that it could share with me something important, except that I didn't understand what it was. 

Sometimes, I thought about confronting my father. 

Who? The man in the shadows who knew how to play walls? 

Forget it, Borys! 

I had to resign myself to looking for my solutions elsewhere, in others, in other activities, and most importantly, keep moving, always moving to shake the source of power inside that body as long as it was still alive. 

We often take for granted the energy running through our veins, the divine breath that wakes us up every morning. Rubbing shoulders with death so often during my missions wrongly made me forget the precious vulnerable life in my father's body.

"Borys, you have to come to the hospital," my mother's voice whispered weakly over the phone one evening. "It's your dad," she said, hanging up immediately.