Home, They Say

He steps off the plane

to a world that has kept moving,

each day slipping by like sand

through fingers he can’t steady.

Faces familiar, yet distant,

they greet him with words

that feel hollow in his ears,

a chorus of gratitude

that fails to reach his heart.

Home, they say,

but the word feels foreign,

a language he no longer speaks.

The silence of the night

is louder than gunfire,

echoing the emptiness

he can't seem to fill.

Here, the battles are invisible,

the enemy unknown,

and the lines are blurred

between purpose and void.

He wonders,

not for the first time,

if he left his meaning

in the dust of a distant land,

if the man he became

only exists in the heat of combat,

where fear and resolve

are the only truths that matter.

Here, he drifts,

a shadow among the living,

longing for the clarity of war,

where each breath was a decision,

each step a choice between life and death.

He misses the weight of duty,

the sense of something larger

than the quiet,

endless days that now stretch

before him,

aching for a battle

he knows he shouldn’t crave,

yet can’t help but desire.

He doesn’t speak of it,

this yearning to return,

but it’s there,

like a wound that never heals,

a whisper that tells him

he was more alive

in the face of danger

than he is in the embrace of safety.

He wonders,

if he’s still fighting a war,

or if the war is fighting him.