I Envy You

Have you ever felt pain? Have you ever seen blood? Have you ever been touched by Death? If you haven't, I envy you, for I have seen them all in a handful of days. I wish with all my mind that I could forget them but memories, like years, can't be obliterated.

The days occurred when I was a boy of 14. It was the second year of the war that destroyed my kin, that destroyed me. The attack remains a blur but I remember that we never heard the enemy coming. I remember the sounds of screaming and burning wood. They've haunted my hearing for years, but the images if the enemy taking my father's head off of his shoulder have forever haunted my memory, my dreams, my mind and my soul.

The burn of desperation to escape the same fate cursed me to make the foolish decision to set sail without food or water on a boat with no sail. The journey was as much a blur as the attack was. I never heard the snap of wood, but I'll never forget the crunching of bone and the pain that tortured my small body. The torture would increase tenfold at the smallest movement, the slightest attempt to move the broken mast off my crushed leg.

The desperation and hopelessness overwhelmed my mind and sense. I wanted it to stop. The pain, the fear, the despair; I wanted it to stop.

I saw the axe in a pain-crazed haze. In my weakened state, I only saw the deep red spill out of the stump briefly before darkness took me.

I was alone in a world of black. I felt nothing, I saw nothing. But then, I saw her. She was a beautiful creature with long black hair that made her porcelain skin seem whiter. Her dress was white but the tattered cloth did nothing to take away from her elegance or her beauty. She smiled at me and she held out one of her elegant hands. I reached out to take it but an unseen force held me back.

"Come with me." She whispered, holding her hand closer, "I'll take you to a place with no pain and no suffering." I reached out my hand again and nearly touched her when she suddenly disappeared and my world was shrouded in black again.

When I woke up, my life was turned upside down. My home had been destroyed, my family murdered, I had lost everything below my left knee, and I was in the land of my enemies. The woman taking care of me was oblivious to the fact that I was her enemy.

I stayed with the family that took care of me. I wanted to go back but, there was nothing for me to go back to. Even if there was, I'm not who I used to be. I wasn't the weak, disappointing son of a chief who wanted to fight dragons and wanted to fit in more than anything. No, that boy was gone. Now I'm just a cripple that was found at sea.

I have seen everything, I have felt everything. Pain, sadness, envy, fear. Like most things in life, they came as quickly as they left but what always returned was envy. It boils in me when I see naïve children play with each other, or when I see a father's love for his son. I feel envy for their childhood innocence and happiness, but I'm glad that they haven't seen the horrors I've seen, that they have been saved from the pain I've felt. I'm glad that they aren't me.