HYP: Marah
Perpetual rain mixed with the booming of the artillery. The women were terrified, and the children were crying as if someone had taken their best toy away from them.
Sarah was shocked. She remembered being a child watching cartoons with her siblings. Love and care surrounded their little house and her mum would make them their favourite snacks. She remembered the battles that happened between the good and evil characters in the programmes, and she understood that this time, she was in a real battle. The fear attacked her and invaded her mind. She felt her heart beating.
In the middle of all these sounds and thoughts, she was waiting for something – her death. An epic fight was raging between the army and the local men of the area, and the government airplanes were bombing the neighbourhood. The only sounds you could hear were the bombs, the women howling, the men screaming.
However, there was a sound louder than all of these. No one was screaming anymore. Everything was silent. Flesh and blood was all that Sarah saw. Her family, her best friend and even the little boy she used to mind when his mum was working.
Sarah looked around her with the hope of finding someone alive. She saw men running towards her – checking if she was alright. She was in shock, she was physically unharmed and all she wanted was to save the victims. The men, the doctors, the nurses and even civilians were racing against time, hoping to save the injured. Sarah wished that her family were among the injured! Such a terrible girl wishing bad things upon her family, but being injured was better than being dead.
They started to move the injured people to makeshift hospitals built in the neighborhood, and the men moved those who had been killed to bury them.
She didn’t know at that moment that she would go on to live her life without saying “Mum” anymore, she didn’t know that she wouldn’t be able to have a cuddle from her Dad.
The life she had known had turned black in Sarah’s eyes.
Sarah became lonely in this world like a bird that had lost its wings.
15 years later, Sarah looked back and wondered how she managed to face such darkness with such strength. She had travelled to the UK to save the remaining part of her soul, to study to become a journalist and to convey the reality of this world; to write about these things within her.
Sarah was still lonely, but had started, again, to find her wings.
Marah, 25
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