going home

sometimes I remember Mr. Light.

he was the kind, silent type, 

slightly older than most recruits,

but doing his time patiently like the rest of us.

it was rare to find Mr. Light arguing,

or expressing a strong opinion;

he mostly listened,

and kept to himself.

there was something delicate

and soft

about his silence,

like a pillow, or a teacup:

impossible to cause any harm.

it’s easy to forget a person like that.

someone that neither excited

nor annoyed you.

and I expect I’d have forgotten all about him by now,

if it wasn’t for a single discussion we had,

a week before he got his leave from the army.

he said there were two things he was looking forward to,

once he got out.

the first was the marathon.

it was his dream to be able to run the full marathon,

and he was training the whole year for it.

I’m sure he did great.

the second was going back to the village where he grew up.

there was his childhood home there,

waiting for him,

if he wanted it.

but there was also a friend.

a friend he hadn’t spoken to for quite some time.

a friend that,

at some point,

had been much more than that.

and Mr. Light hoped,

and hoped,

and hoped so hard and for so long,

that it was starting to leak through him.

you could see his hands tremble

and his eyes water as he talked about it,

you could almost smell the excitement and fear,

almost hear his heart pound faster.

he hoped so much he couldn’t stand hoping any more,

that his friend might be there,

like his childhood home,

waiting.

it’s hard to guess if he deserved it,

but even so,

I hope he got a chance

to make things right.

 ______

going home by Dimitrios Kokkinos is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License