The girl with green lips

The sound of screams is an unfortunate reality you get accustomed to. It is the silence, the silence that burrows deep into your stomach and heart pulling them low, that you never get used to. This place once mighty is a concrete wasteland drowning in silence and rubble. Its name is of no importance as a nightmare was all it had fallen to. It's song was no different than the rest in the end. When the screams grew few the invaders did too, looking for the next city to conquer. Our city lay in ruins with many of us resting forever underneath it fertilizing the soil they so desperately wanted to claim. When the stillness of it all became deafening I ventured out from the rubble which once was my temporary home. Long gone were the broken families separated by either a duty to serve or death. Even the children left parentless had been collected and taken elsewhere. I was a crypt keeper and the city the mausoleum of death. Every structure that lay tucked in my memory lay strewn about the ground in pieces. Bodies of those whose families had either all perished or in their haste not had time to lay them to rest were piled and strewn as well. The bread lines had ran for safer spaces as they and hospitals were shown no mercy. The eyes of the dead would be whenever I closed my eyes reminding me of the reality no one saw coming.

For days I would scavenge for food, for anything really to keep my mind off of the dead. Granted there was little to no food. The silence at first was broken by the sounds of stomachs, but they too after a while gave up. Most people had moved on now in search of food, people, and anything but here. I tried to think of peaceful times, of my family, but much like a revolving door the nightmare of the first day came back around.

We were a land of freedom. When they put chemicals into the water it was for our own good or so they said. Yet still we were free. When we refused refugees admittance due to policy, we shrugged it off because we were still free. When we locked children in cages like animals, we told ourselves it was okay. They were not our children we were still free. Then they rode in vans on our streets, picking up those who they thought didn't belong, but it was okay because we were still free. Weren't we? Then we awoke one morning under siege, no longer able to claim full freedom because it was now us who faced these horrors.

An only child to elderly parents and just broken up with I found myself at a makeup kiosk.

"You look like a girl who needs some hope and faith in her life." The sale lady spoke with her bright green lips beaming as she handed me a dark green lipstick tube.

"I could never pull off this color." I shyly admit shrugging slightly. I was worried what people would think of me wearing such a bold color.

"It's not for them, its for you. Free yourself darlin'." She beamed handing me the lipstick already bagged and paid for.

Those words fed pure sunshine to my mind, making me feel free from the depression that had settled inside of me. How could something so trivial as lipstick and a smile change the course of your life, or at least you ending it. One random kindness, one last kindness to foreshadow the treachery was to come. Before I could clear the door making it into the malls food court shots rang out. Shots and a strange language I couldn't understand, and so much screaming followed. I would later realize most of the screaming was my own. The woman grabbed my arm pulling back into the store and under a makeup counter. She held my hand until the gunfire along with the screaming subsided. We sat there in silence for thirty minutes, not quite sure if a wrong move would bring the chaos rushing back. Hearing sirens in the distance I look to the woman to tell her we should be safe soon. Beyond that bright lipstick that had given me the hope to carry on sat lifeless eyes. Her body was slumped, sitting in a pool of blood. A scream pierced through the cacophony and chaos again it however was my own. I was still holding her hand. I couldn't run. I couldn't pull myself away from her because of the fear of what was outside being worse. Cowardice had once again become me.

I found myself living in a modern-day history book. The pages of treachery every orphaned or dead child a still frame forever etched in my nightmares and mind. Most of all I saw her, the woman with the green lips. I wretched tinging her blood with my vomit. My tears...no my screams fell like meteors on a dead planet. This was my first sight of death, but more so of the cruelty that is war. The lifeless eyes of children mangled and bloodied , prams twisted by carnage these are the things that should have held more horror for me than the woman, but they didn't. They were not left to navigate this hardship alone. There parents often close were able to give them hopefully some mild comfort in knowing they would be together. This was the first time I truly questioned my faith. How could any father let his children slaughter each other over lines in the sand. Eventually I would learn there is no religion in war, just selfishness. I stayed in the city of many turned few, to show faith to others that normalcy of some sort might once again reign. I wanted this new normal to stop. I wanted singing and the sight of families not confined to coffins. I wanted butterflies not bullet fragments and shell splinters.

Freedom, that word had meaning just four weeks ago. I held it in my mouth unsavored; taking every moment for granted. Now freedom hung far from reach much like an exotic fruit on a distant aisle. Through the rubble flowers now rise, a true sign of perseverance in the eye of destruction. The earth is rising along with us in defiance . I will be here watering the resistance hoping that while my lips don't hold the color of hope what I coax from the earth will. Freedom will spring from this land once more and our people along with it. True freedom is not having the total autonomy to do exactly as we wish. True freedom is knowing our spirit penetrates these streets. True freedom is knowing that no matter what may try to knock us down or erase us we will still rise.