There’s a change that took place. Maybe it’s indefinable, that je ne sais quoi, but whatever had been wasn’t. Like when you meet up with an old friend and realize you, or maybe it’s him… you aren’t the same anymore. Without that boss making both your lives hell, or the atmosphere of the school that made a cigarette a thousand times better by making it illicit—I can’t explain what I feel.
Opposition, even deadly opposition, gives character. For five years, we were a besieged city taking dreadful losses we couldn’t afford. I don’t want to go back, but I miss that heroism. Back then, I knew who I was when I woke up; even if I wished I had died in my sleep, I woke up in the same place in which I had lain down.
Now that the nightmare is over, I’m all at sea, drifting and landless. Yesterday I decided to walk my old beat, as it were. I wanted to see the city again from the wall, like I used to. There were young men there who did not speak our language, or at least not well, who laughed at me and would not let me up the stairs.
Well, I have no other trade than violence. It is how I have lived till now. I did go up on the wall, but I do not recognize this place anymore. It looks the same, but it’s not, somehow.
Tale Told 