Making It Better
Every day I help out at the shelter. If they knew who I was, they'd cast me out, beat me, tear me apart with their bare hands. Every day I leave the spot under the highway where I sleep and walk ten blocks through the shattered remnants of the city to the shelter. There I scrub floors and pans until my hands bleed, I cook and serve food until I'm barely able to stand and I help out in any way I can until the people running the place tell me to go home. They smile and nod at me whenever come in, but I don't meet their eyes. I keep my head down and throw myself into whatever menial, back-breaking task is set before me until it's time to go back under the highway and rest my head on a filthy blanket until morning.
Every day I walk through the jutting bones of the city - past blackened husks of buildings that look like God picked them up and smashed them down again. Every day I walk past the wreckage of a thousand lives, past people reduced to huddling in doorways against the cold and children scavenging for food like feral things. Every day I have to live with the knowledge that this is all my fault.
I did this.
I failed to keep my country safe from war. I failed to see past the smiles of those that wished us harm. And when I failed at the last hope of diplomacy and the bombs fell like black fists and shattered our nation, I failed to protect my people. So I fled into anonymity, fled into the same destitution that stalked the land like a vast, gaunt devil, feeding upon the people whose ruin I had brought about. And although I know redemption will forever be beyond my reach, every day I struggle to make things a bit better - one little piece at a time.
END
