[CTFOBrian]

This is a story about how my old man lost his life to the Great War, I still remember the cold, lifeless stare he would give me as he creaked back and forth in his rocking chair... his eyes, filled with the victims of war... and no, he didn’t lose his life on the battlefield but... he lost pretty much everything else... his personality, his ability to speak, and most of all: his happiness... I wasn’t even sure if he recognized me half the time... it was as if a complete stranger had taken refuge in our living room... just a cold, lifeless husk with moons under his eyes and... a pair of cheekbones screaming with malnutrition as he sat there, all alone... downing bottle and bottles of whiskey just so he could feel something... I knew that even though he could no longer speak... that my old dad was probably still in there somewhere... the dad that use to explode with charisma and positivity no matter what the circumstances... the dad that would take me to the park and push me on the swing until his arms got tired and we would fall over together in the grass... even when he first got drafted, he seemed invincible like no amount of war would ever be able to change him... even though I knew deep down that he was probably scared... the day he left he made a joke along the lines of: “if there is a god out there, may he have mercy... upon my soul.” If he only knew how tragically ironic that was... many years went by and my mother became deathly ill... bedbound with a jarring flu that only seemed to get worse everyday... our neighbor... our neighbors would... sometimes stop by with... homemade medicines and antidotes but... as the days passed they started to show up less and less... I think it was because they started to realize it was becoming futile... and the day I found my mother dead was the day i was catapulted out of my childhood...and I buried her with a handful of tulips from our garden but for some reason I never shed a single tear... before she had passed she had... baked a apple pie and let it cool on the windowsill... hoping the fragrance would guide my father back home... and the day my mother died was the very last day that my father was human... and I looked in the mirror and I started crying, because I realized that despite all these tragedies in life I still... had a tiny-ass *****, and I would never be able to recover... and that was, truly, the saddest thing of all.