I feel as though Valour best summarizes the period I’m in at the moment. It feels like I’m on a battlefield in a prolonged state of attritional warfare. The chain of command has broken down, no new orders coming in over the radio, and the snow blankets the ground, covering up the dead and dying. The booms of cannons and the rays of machine gun fire is deafening, drowning out the screams of the wounded.

I’m a single soldier trying to understand this new reality, this new phase, with no overview or a core strategy, what am I to do? Rush at the enemy, hoping to break through?

With the chain broken, we’re no longer a cohesive unit, but singular molecules swimming around, polarizing, repellent forces of attraction, and I notice the indifference taking hold in the people around me. Like beads on a chain cut at one end, we’re simply rolling on the floor, underneath the crevices where light has never touched before. Some have managed to escape the room altogether, but is now stuck and secluded in another realm of existence beyond our scope of imagination. Our initial momentum, whilst great, can’t carry us forever. And with nothing more to push us around, we come to a stop, having spun around for a little while. I feel as if I’m a singular bead that’s rolled underneath the bookshelf and into the corner, alone, but with no clear sight of what’s going on in the room at large.

And now I’m not getting any new orders, no voice on coms, no messages, and the quiet has set in. I’m not noticed, not tallied among the dead or wounded, I’m simply left underneath, and alone in the corner I’ve made my home.

I’m not recognized, not acknowledged, and the bead that once glimmered in the light now receives no light. It collects dust, and the words of warmth that carried me so far has stopped. The well has run dry. I realize that I’m not a soldier in a well oiled war machine, but a singular entity veiled off from the rest of both imagination and reality. And there’s no hope for rescue, because no one cares for bead number 47 in a chain of a 100 beads.

No one cares. There’s freedom in that, and a better person would leverage that position, but I’ve lost all my initial momentum. For now all I can do is gander at the walls, hoping to catch a sighting of some difficult to perceive shadows dancing on the walls in the corner I’ve made my home. My refuge, my sanctuary, as my isolation drains all the colors off of my skin, and my very essence turns to dust.

My skin being as thick and hard as it is makes it impossible to erode completely, I can’t even find company in the dust that weighs me down. There’s a permeating stillness that seeps into the holes that once chained me to my brethren. My shield and armor makes me impenetrable, but also susceptible to falling through the cracks, of drowning in the ever darkening fabric of reality. A person is a sum of many things, but here I’ve lost access to it all. I’m less than real, and my tenuous grip on reality is slowly draining the little strength I have left. Should I just let go? Accept the outcome, accept that which must come to pass at one point for all of us? Or should I stay here in the corner for a little while longer, hoping they run out of beads and go looking for their missing bead?

In this day and age you don’t. In another era you might’ve. Now you’d simply purchase some more, you’d get a different set, better suited for your purpose. And I’m stuck by myself, a chalice of broken dreams, visions and a container of memories of what could’ve been, but never came to pass.

A broken dream.