I Was a Good Soldier

Then I was nothing

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I was sixteen the first time a man called me a faggot. I was twenty-two the first time I let myself believe he might have been right. In between, I wore a uniform, carried a rifle, and did everything I could to prove to the world and myself that I was a good soldier. Because good soldiers don’t cry. Good soldiers don’t flinch. Good soldiers don’t let people see them break.

They never told us that war wouldn’t end when they said it was over. That it would come home with us. That it would sit beside us in empty rooms, curl up in our chests at night, wait in the silence like a trap we’d never stop stepping into.

And when it does, it doesn’t just haunt you — it rewires you.

It lives in your hands, curled into fists that never unclench. It lives in your shoulders, locked stiff as if the weight of a rifle still lingers. It lives in your skin, in the places where bruises fade but the pressure never does. It lives in the way you flinch at fireworks and crowded streets, in the way you still brace for the recoil of a gun that isn’t there, in the way the world keeps moving as though it never happened.

It stays in the quiet, too. In the stillness of an empty room, where silence isn’t peace but a battlefield waiting for the next shot. In the way your shadow startles you, the way your…