It’s hard to believe that I can still taste that tremor within my dreams after all that time had passed by. The freshness of gunpowder and the stinkiness of fresh blood, the deafening sounds of tanks, grenades and bullets flying around wake me up from the hallucinative dream. The graveness of all those groans and moans still make me sick to the core. Its still hard for me to go through that night all over again, but my life is destined to gag me, and I don’t even blame it for doing that. For the day I was posted in the barren lands of Afghanistan, I knew Life had something big for me. It wasn’t because of the cruel, extremist, hypocritical image of the Taliban, but it was something what your 6th sense keeps on feeding you at the back of your mind.

Strange as it may seem, when you’re there at the battlefield, the heat and the adrenaline shows you the wildest mirages of things similar to your life back home. The happiness of the moment when you hold the love of your family sent over to you in the form of a letter remains unexplainable. Thus the misery that haunts you when you lie to them about the situation at the ground and the guilt that prevails becomes unbearable. Living in the digital world sending letters instead of emails doesn’t make any difference. Both cannot define the intensity of a lie and the depth of the pain that it holds. I’ve been lying on this bed immobile for months, unable to do anything on my own. I keep on running my life on the raged roads of my memory. No matter how tight the walls get over me, I know they aren’t for real, for I’ve seen worse that night. I just can’t compare those hours spent beneath all that rubble with the static life here on the bed.

It was the time when he and I were aiming for the opponents group and those clever headed goons aimed the missile directly at our barrack, that was when everything around changed, for the both of us. That is the time when all your plans, trainings and war strategies turn out to be complete failures. Then it’s just you and your Fate, the time when you say ‘What’s meant to happen will happen’. If only I could save him that night. If only I had all the strength to take myself and him out of all that misery. All I could see from the corner of my eye, stuck under the debris, was his half burnt face and lips calling out for someone’s mercy. If only I could reach up to him and touch his agonizing body which was torn into a hundred pieces, I believe that things would have been different today. Looking at him lying there in complete abyss I never realized the intensity of pain my body was bearing for so long. I could hear him calling out each one of his loved one’s names, shouting from the depth of his ruptured lungs of how much he loved them and wanted to be with them right now. My eyes couldn’t even come up with tears because of the numbness of all that pain. The once present tremor in his voice was soon fading away for he knew it was time to fly away.

I never realized if he was even conscious of the fact that I was still there with him. Calling out his name from that darkened, grimy corner, I could sense a state of shock reflected in his voice, which vanished as quickly as it appeared. Hear him laugh tearfully, wrenched my soul from the inside. All I could do was to talk to him, and make these last moments of his life less miserable for him. I just can’t forget those last few lines that he spoke to me before leaving me behind all alone “Don’t just loose your hope for tonight, as I know you will live unto the day to witness the glory of that Morning”. Looking into his frozen eyes, I couldn’t deny what he said. It was hard for me to comprehend for how those excruciating minutes, turned into hours and how I actually made it till the morning. The moment when those first few rays caressed my face, peeking through that hole, I couldn’t believe I have been found. They say the realization about the truth is the hardest of all. Lying there motionless for hours before they took me out, I kept thinking of nothing, nothing at all, as if my mind wasn’t able to get itself out from the sense of shock that it went through the entire night. Being carried away in that stretcher I kept thinking if I would really be able to make it to the Hospital and then lying here in the bed at home I realize that I have a long way to go through after that night. Staring at the floor at which the early morning rays have started their game, I believe in what my mate said to me, I did live up to witness the glory of this Morning, irrespective of what I lost or how much I lost, I thank the Lord for keeping me alive through that night just so I could live up my life to witness the glory that His world holds for me.