I awake from a dream where dirt and ash are covering me. The taste of death and decay is stuck at the back of my throat. All around me is a sea of bodies and blood. I have reached the end point, a mass field where there lays nothing but peoples memories leaking out of their decaying, broken bodies. There are pieces of themselves laying everywhere. Things they carried with them that are now haphazardly scattered across a decimated landscape. Letters from girlfriends and boyfriends, small stones and buttons, a small decorated mirror, dogtags, necklaces, hankerchiefs, bandannas, and other miscellaneous items that once held meaning to the people that possessed them.
I have this dream a lot. It is almost on a nightly basis that I awake in my bed gasping for fresh air, trying to claw myself away from the mass pile of death that surrounds me. It has been ten years and I still have not escaped this nightmare. Maybe because once it wasn't a horrible dream but rather my life. Maybe because there was a time where I wasn't reliving it but actually experience it. Maybe because the memories you collect you are never able to shake.
There are a hundred faces that swim in my vision as I stare at the cieling trying to convince myself that I am no longer in that field. Some of the bodies I saw were old friends, people whom I had grown attatched to. Others were those that I hated. Yet at that moment it didn't matter whether I had cared about them or not. I would not, nor could I ever have wished that fate on anybody. I wouldn't even want my worst enemy to end up as a body in that field. No one deserves that. Not a single person on this earth.
For years I have carried around not only my memories but the memories of others too. And over those years I have found that death clings to people like a ghost. It follows us, watches us, whispers to us in the late hours. It never leaves. I have been haunted by a hundred faces, each one reminding me that they are no longer here. They have passed on to another world where they can never forget what happened to them. Death stalks those who've watched it unfold right before their own eyes. I have spent far too many nights mingling with death and getting crushed under it's weight. Ghosts have their own taste, it is like trying to swallow a rock. Rough on the tongue, scraping against the throat. It feels  like the air is being forced out of you. At least the taste of decay and death leaves. The taste of those who still haunt stay forever.
Some things I will never be able to forget and it hurts to still have to carry them around after all this time. It has been years and still every night I am forced to revisit the field where I watched what seemed like a million bodies lined up next to each other. I can see myself then, overwhelmed by the loss and pain of watching all of those that I had once known become nothing more than just another body to bury. And every night I get the same dull ache beneath my chest, like my lungs have been folded up  and my heart might just stop at that very moment. I find it hard to breathe because I can still see that cloudless blue sky swirling above me. I can still feel the sun beating down and casting shadows over the sea of the people who were no longer present in their own bodies.
The memory will never leave me. It will cling to my skin, as it does now, and will aways remind me of those days, of that point in time. Some people said I was lucky I got out, they said "Oh you survived, you must be so greatful.". I am not greatful. In fact I'm quite angry, because every day since I got out all I've been able to think about is what I could have, should have, didn't do. And every day since I left all I've been able to see is dead body after dead body.
I was not lucky, I should have been one of the bodies in that field. But I wasn't. And every day since then, and every day for the rest of my life I will dream that same dream. I will remember, and I don't think I will ever move on.
People don't understand what death tastes like. They don't know what it's like to watch as your whole entire world becomes nothing but a mass grave. They ask questions that trigger horrid memories. People don't let you forget, they are almost as bad as the ghosts that still wrap themselves around your shoulders like a blanket. Everywhere I go there is a constant reminder of what I've witnessed, of what I've been through.
I awake from this dream on a nightly basis. This dream where there is a cloudless blue sky above me and dense thick green forest surrounding a grassy field. This dream where ther is body and ash surrounding me, suffocating me. I have this dream where I am standing in a sea of death, decay, and hopelessness. And every night I awake from this dream, more terrified than the day before, more terrified than when I was actually experiencing it. And every night I awake, hating myself, because I recognize face after face and all I can think is that I should be in their place.
I may have left the war, but the war still has not left me. I don't think it ever will. Until the day I die, I will always have the memory sticking to my skin, flowing through my veins, pumping through my system like some sort of drug. I am addicted to the memories, but only because I don't know how to leave them, and they don't know how to leave me.