Someday



Can you imagine losing everyone you love in just a split second?


One moment, you’re enjoying dinner with your family, you and your mom laughing at your dad sighing at another one of your brother’s bad jokes, and the next, fire rains from the skies, reducing everything around you to ash. You escape, gasping and crawling—barely clinging to what’s left of your life as your vision fades to black under a coat of blood.


When you wake up, it’s not at a hospital, but at the ruins of a school that people have no other choice but to use at the time, all while still fearing that same merciless fire that seeks to erase us. You know full well it’s only a matter of time. You then learn from the mother of your now-deceased classmate that you’re the sole survivor of your household, a place that you may never see again. It hurts. The pain is more excruciating than the fractured stump that was once an arm, more than the swirling burns that were once a face.


The shred of vision you have left leaves you squinting at the blurry figures flickering on the screen before you, but the remorseless voices of the global superpowers still sting your ears all the same. They call you, a mere teenager who was just struggling to survive school a few days ago, a terrorist of all things. Now you’re struggling every waking hour to survive missiles and gunfire. The echoes rattling in the distance leave you awake at night, knowing that, somewhere out there, more children like you are losing either their families or their own lives. Or both.


The few people around the world that march on, protesting in your stead, spark a small glimmer of hope within you, but as the culling of your people is drawn out ever longer, even that light is slowly snuffed by the shadows circle you, seeking to ensnare you in their malicious grip and suffocate what little life you have left. Yet still, the solidarity of that few is something you’ll cling to even on the darkest of days, for it lets you imagine a time in the future when everyone else will see you as a regular human being and not a monster. You hope with all your heart that such a day will come, even if you yourself may not be alive to see it.


Learning that the number of voices speaking out against the acts of violence committed against you is on a steady rise brings a smile to your face. You’ve already accepted the possibility that fate may not lead you far into the future, but you’re glad nonetheless that there are those who will remember you as who you truly were: just an ordinary child who wanted to skip classes to play with her friends—someone who enjoyed watching fantasy shows with her silly brother who wouldn’t shut up, who loved baking sweet treats with her mother who was the most giving woman she knew, and who was thrilled assembling computers with her nerdy dad. Maybe someday…

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