672 Days of What Went Wrong
 

We held him in the basement all throughout the war, and never did I think he was bound to survive. I saved him from being a hostage, I pulled off those hands gripping that gun and tore down that flag tied around his neck. Some say he’s a hero, a traitor, a winner, a loser. But what else does a man raised in a household like his know, with family like bombs on a battlefield?
Scars curve down his fingers, crawling up his arms and circling the dark rings under his mystic eyes. I see war in them, men running and the grenades loading, fire a deeper red than the blood coursing through me. Women captured, children killed, a broken record in his heart. He doesn’t tell me, but I know, I see it down his stained cheeks and through to his organs and up to his boiling mind full of clusters. They reflect outward of him and project a thunder that rumbles below my feet and electrifies me awake with each movement of his Earth, his world of death and destruction with not so much as a smile to course to him. I try and try, again and again, but no amount of times I envelope my arms around him can squeeze the nightmares out, no amount of warm kisses pressed against his cold cheeks can expel the look of a fallen brother, bleeding out on the grass.
No matter how many times I hold his hands does it feel anything less than a gun ready to fire within his palms, calloused and burned from the recoil of 672 days sprinkling gun powder on the chests of enemies. The seam he once stitched along my soul combusts in half and spills onto his world when I see him shake from the war of REM sleep, when he cries from the past. I can’t handle the feeling anymore and every time I see him look at his medals I die a little bit, and my heart shatters into glass on the floor, bloodying my feet and digging into my bones.   Snowflakes cover his soul, freezing his heart and no matter how many times I tell him I love him I can’t chip away the ice.
“I love you,” I whisper, words slipping into his broken ears.
“I love you,” I repeat, longing for a response so much as a look. I’m invisible, masked behind the film over his world, repeating that same bomb over and over again.
“I love you,” I’m the bomb, breaking him apart, ticking into pieces. Boom, debris fall across our feet. Bang, we fall into the rubble. Bam, we’re dead.  My heart pours and spills beneath us. I want him, I want what we had, and I want love back. Empty of joy, my heart was void of anything but danger, the Pandora’s Box of PTSD. He’s loveless, lost, and dead. Where is he? I push pass the ocean of our leaking hearts but I can’t find him.
“I love you,” he says.