daydream in sepia

young charles durning thought it would be nice if he left a handsome photograph for his sweetheart. to pore over for the three or so months he'd be away for. they said it would be over by christmas. but as the snow fell they dug in.

even as the sky doused him with a morass of sleet so malignant it made his young bones groan, charles would ascend to another place. he'd imagine his sweetheart, below that very same sky. he thought of her thinking of him, writing him the many letters that he knew she had written.

(they had just gotten lost in this glorious war machine. charlie knew undoubtedly she always wrote to him. he wrote to her every day. maybe she didnt get his letters. charlie couldnt handle this thought. and so charlie write to her, in the toilet, as he was supposed to be firing his gun with aim, at every second he could spare. his bundle for the postman was always the biggest, and the most hilariously unnessecary).

he didn't know that she had taken up house with his big brother.
he didn't know that she couldnt bring herself to open his letters (not out of guilt, she just couldn't bear reading a simpletons declarations of abandonment to love).
he didn't know that his job filling shelves at the corner store would not be reserved for him upon his triumphant return home.
all he knew was his love. his silly, grand, big, endless, wasted love.

one morning the sky was blue. as the signal resounded for a call to arms, charlie realised that the sky was never blue. perhaps this meant the war had moved elsewhere. and so charlies thoughts shifted back barely a millimetre onto his sweetheart. there she was under that same sky, being ravished by a metallic downpour.

his sweet simple heart, feeble to everything bar love, couldn't bear thinking of its custodians debasement. and so with the thought to annihilate all thoughts charlie ran out into no mans land. clearing the barbed wire with such virtuousity that he had galloped almost clear across the waste.

the snow had long buried young charlie by that third year. and that uniformed photograph had fallen long before between the cracks. luckily for charlie he hadn't the faculty to realise it had disappeard the very moment it had been taken.