Where I End, I Begin

I woke up to the sound of shelling. It had become my usual morning routine, the same way my hair felt heavy and greasy now under the helmet I never took off. I was transferred to the eastern frontline not long ago, but I’ve already learned that if I had to sum up war, it would be mud.

Mud everywhere… On the tip of my tongue, in my nostrils, in the back of my throat. I never thought I could hate that earthy taste so much. But it makes sense. My whole day is spent hiding in it, sleeping in it, eating with hands already caked in it, simply living inside it.

I’ve always been slow to wake up, but now mornings have become a greater torture than night duty or attacks, mostly because I no longer have a reason to wake up.

What I would give for a clean shirt and a cup of strong coffee from the café near my Aunt Agnes’s apartment. The coffee there was extraordinary, bitter and sharp. Funny how the earth tastes the same now.

I come to my senses and realize my knee is still aching.

I should go see Anna. For the last six months, she’s been the only person here who speaks softly. Sometimes I exaggerated my symptoms just to talk to her, and to treat myself to the sugary caramel candies she made over the fire, letting sugar slowly bubble and darken in a spoon, as if she was always too busy to care about doing it properly.

Thinking about how she would react to my whining today, I barely noticed myself reaching the medical tent, where half our brigade was already gathered.

I stood staring at the ugly clock hanging inside the tent, until the other nurse, Mary, finally noticed me.

“Soldier Renati, is there anything I can help you with?”

“My knee hurts like hell. I was wondering if some morphine might help.”

She raised an eyebrow. “No offense, but you got a horse dose last night. Let’s see how it feels in a few hours.”

She looked at me like she already knew why I had really come there. It’s better not to argue with old Mary unless you want the entire medical unit against you.

I left the tent muttering, “Feels like it already wore off.”

I know it’s pointless to beg them. They have their own protocols they have to follow. I’m walking through scorched earth and, out of the corner of my eye, I notice something strange. Strange, because there’s almost no greenery in our area, yet there’s a small patch of grass, as if a dandelion managed to break through the cement. God, is that you? I haven’t seen the gifts of the earth in so long, haven’t been charmed by birds singing or the sound of a stream. My music has become bursts of gunfire and the whistle of artillery shells.

I turn my head and see a small plantain bush quietly spreading its leaves, as if trying to pretend it’s a water lily. My mom used to tell me as a child that plantain could heal any wound. Funny, right? Even as I’ve grown hardened, something in me still wants to try it.

I pick a small leaf and return to my trench. I stare at it for a long time; it seems much more alive than me. Straightening and smoothing it out, I carefully press it against my knee. Today we only watch the enemy positions and wait. Strange how easily the word enemy became natural. Men I had never met before had somehow become less than human in my mind.

My knee throbbed again. I took a slow breath.

A few years ago, back when I was still a graduate student, my professor used to speak endlessly about pain and breathing. We studied physics, but he treated every lecture like philosophy. He once told us the body panics before the mind does.

“Breathe first,” he said, tapping cigarette ash into a coffee cup. “Then decide whether you’re dying.”

At the time I thought he was insane. Now I realize he was probably just a smart guy. Lying in a trench with a plantain leaf pressed against my knee, I noticed the pain had actually begun to fade.

Tonight I’m assigned to a night raid, so they ordered me to sleep a bit while the others watched the position.

I swear I only closed my eyes for a moment. When I opened them again, the trench was gone.

The mud beneath my boots had turned into black-and-white tile flooring stained with water and ash. Somewhere above me, pipes groaned like wounded animals. A dim yellow light flickered overhead.

My knee no longer hurt. I looked around slowly and wandered the hall.

Rows of strange machines stretched across the room, coils of copper wire, glass cylinders bubbling with dark liquid, enormous steel devices covered in dials and handwritten calculations. The air smelled of iodine, smoke, and burnt metal.

Then I saw him.

“Professor?”

He stood beside a massive apparatus that looked half medical instrument, half artillery cannon. His gray coat hung from his shoulders exactly the same way it had back at the university.

“You’re late,” he said calmly without turning around.

A radio crackled somewhere in the darkness. For a moment I thought I heard artillery again, but the explosions sounded distant now, as if the war itself had sunk underwater.

“What is this place?” I asked.

The professor ignored the question. Instead, he pointed toward a wall covered in equations and anatomical sketches, pinned together with photographs of wounded soldiers.

In the middle of the wall, written in thick red paint, were the words:

“Being a soldier is like being a phoenix: you die and get reborn all over again.” The letters looked wet, as if they had just been painted. I stepped closer. Among the papers, I suddenly recognized my own handwriting. The professor finally turned toward me. His face looked older than I remembered.

“War accelerates transformation,” he said quietly. “A man rarely survives it as himself.”

The machine behind him began to hum louder. Then I noticed the glass chambers, inside each one stood another version of me. A university student clutching physics books. A bloodied soldier, half his face lost to ruin. An old man with hollow eyes. And in the final chamber… Only ashes. The machine suddenly roared to life. Then the ashes moved.

At first only slightly, as if disturbed by wind, but there was no wind in the laboratory. The gray pile trembled inside the glass chamber, folding inward and outward like something breathing beneath a blanket.

I stumbled back.

“Professor…” My voice cracked. “What is this?”

The old man watched the chamber silently, his face illuminated by the pale electrical glow.

“The war,” he said at last, “is teaching mankind something it was never meant to learn.”

The ashes began to darken. Then, slowly, fingers emerged from them. Human fingers. My stomach twisted.

“No…”

The hand clawed weakly against the glass. More of the body followed, a wrist, ribs, the shape of a skull beneath thin skin, as though someone were developing a photograph too quickly.

I wanted to look away, but I couldn’t. The figure inside the chamber was me. Not exactly me. Older perhaps. Thinner. Its body was covered in burns and black soot, yet its eyes were open long before the face had fully formed.

And those eyes already recognized me.

The professor approached the chamber carefully.

“You asked me once,” he murmured, “whether energy can ever truly disappear.”

I remembered the university lecture hall in winter, myself half asleep in a warm haze while he smoked near the chalkboard and spoke about thermodynamics and the persistence of matter, as if the world itself was supposed to hold together because of it.

“You said destruction was just transformation,” I whispered.

“Yes.”

The thing inside the chamber smiled. Its teeth were covered in ash. Outside the laboratory, air-raid sirens began to howl. The lights flickered violently. The professor didn’t look at me right away. He watched the wall of chambers instead, as if counting something that had gone wrong.

“They’re closer than expected,” he said finally.

“Who?” I asked.

He hesitated. “That’s not the important question.” He rubbed his fingers together, as if trying to wipe off invisible dust.

“Listen, Mr. Renati…” His voice tightened slightly. “The phoenix was never meant to return,” he said quietly. “Only to be remade.”

The glass began to crack. First one line. Then another. Then the entire wall of chambers fractured at once. Inside, the figures moved, not rushing, just stepping forward as if they had always been waiting for permission.

Ash drifted through the air like slow snow. The burned version of me leaned closer to the broken glass.

“You think war kills people?” it whispered.

The professor finally looked at me, as if noticing I was still there.

“It changes what they are allowed to remain.”

The glass collapsed into a million small pieces. Then the laboratory vanished.

I woke choking in the trench, my fingers dug deep into the muddy earth. For a moment I couldn’t breathe. The night sky above me was endless and black, scattered with cold stars. I wondered if I could ever escape this hell and become something other than a part of this endless mud. Well, I can still breathe. For now, that feels like enough.

The night air is cold and strangely clean after the shelling. It smells like burnt paper, the same paper I used to roll cigarettes with back at the university. Funny how even clean air reminds me of smoke now. I wondered how much ruined metal is sleeping beneath this soil already. Helmets. Bullets. Watches. Teeth. Whole men. The earth swallows everything eventually.

Sometimes I think the weight of my rifle and grenades is nothing compared to what the ground itself carries. All this steel. All these bodies. All the things people tried to destroy each other with. Years from now, someone will still dig pieces of this war out of the dirt. Maybe a child will find a rusted shell where a plantain should have grown.

Maybe that is how wars survive. In the land itself.

Being a soldier is like being a phoenix. You get hurt, you die, and you get reborn all over again. I’m not sure how many versions of me are already dead: the naïve boy who thought life would treat him fairly, the unfinished scientist I once wanted to become, or the hero who believed I could handle it all. Right now, I’m just a pile of ashes, not knowing what my next version will be.

And yet ash is what remains after everything is gone. One day I will disappear too, and there may be no one left to tell what happened here.

But the earth… The earth remembers what we forget.