How will they tell me you are dead?

In a WW1 foxhole, Felix, a German soldier, has survived brutal hand-to-hand combat with Nikolai, who carries letters and photos from his wife Svetlana. What happens when Felix assumes Nikolai’s identity…and writes back?

Dear Nikolai,

How will they tell me you are dead?

Just answer me this: it seems like that is all you can do for me in those bloody trenches. Literally. Your shoes drenched in so much of your brother’s blood that the worn-out leather has turned red. 

How will they tell me you are dead? 

Will they tell me you were a hero? Would they disrespect me in such a way as to lie to my face while breaking the news?

Will they talk to me like a visitor in a hospital’s waiting room (at least, how they used to talk to visitors)? Will they tell me they did everything they could, try to dumb it down for me as if I don’t hear the stories and screams from soldiers who have shot off their legs just to return to nightmares?

Of course, the doctors no longer talk like this. With so many dying from the famine, it’s more of a shock to hear that whoever you were waiting for, praying for, is alive. 

Will they even tell me? Will I just have to search for your name in every newspaper’s obituary, all the while my grief spreads, until it infects my entire heart and soul, eating me alive, a death more painful than you could ever imagine in those hellholes you call trenches?

There are no good outcomes here. Even surviving, and returning home on a train filled to the brim with carcasses and the demented, is a bad outcome. I have seen those who have returned. Those whose prayers made it to God through all the overlapping messages and static, overwhelming the channel to the point where he has abandoned his dumbest creation. 

I know that if you returned, it wouldn’t be you. Your skin, soft like snow, would be hard like the metal you hide the worthless brain that decided to leave me under. And its white color would be a reddish brown, from the blood and dirt which would never come off, no matter how many times you’d try to scrub it off. Every time you would look in a mirror, you would see it, see them, and eventually, you’d find comfort in imagining ripping off your skin and forever shedding the past. Your shiny blue eyes will be dull and will be looking through people to the trenches you left in France, as you would watch your buddy die on replay,

over 

and over

so many different times until you can’t take it anymore! Until screams replace your friendly hellos and you are nicknamed mad!

So, I am asking you to die.

Peacefully and quickly, die without pain.

Do with that information as you will.

Just know that you ruined my life the second you walked out the door. 

– Svetlana