If I Had Endured
A Testament Unsent, Yet Written All the Same
It is, in a way, absurd —
to pen this with the awareness that no one may ever read it.
An inbox, bloated with forgotten outcries,
and mine, just another whisper adrift in the static.
The civil war scarred me in ways I cannot name.
I did not fight with weapons,
only with refusal —
leaving school to stand beside those who still dared to believe in dignity.
Even that… cost more than anyone will ever know.
My childhood offered no reprieve.
I complained, I wept,
as if that were all I was ever good at.
In truth, I was never strong — only loud in my suffering.
I've long suspected I was a blemish on this world —
a smudge upon its skin.
And yet, some stubborn thread within me kept searching,
yearning for a reason to remain.
I thought I'd found one.
But it wasn't salvation — it was dependency,
dressed in the costume of purpose.
Humor became my camouflage.
People called me amusing — strange, perhaps,
but well-mannered.
They weren't wrong.
Only… they never asked what lay behind the laughter.
And what lay behind it…
was silence.
A terrifying, cavernous silence.
A heart echoing with nothing but its own hollowness.
I am afraid.
Utterly, viscerally afraid —
not of dying, but of continuing to exist
in this void I carry inside me.
Still… if I had made it —
if by some cruel miracle I had survived the weight —
this would be my testament.
Not a will of wealth or legacy,
but a quiet record of my being.
Proof that I was here,
that I felt everything too deeply,
that I kept hoping, long after hope had fled