Amidst the muffled thuds of distant artillery, Captain Harold Stryker stared at the untouched cup of tea his wife had left on the table. It had grown cold, yet its pale fragrance lingered in the room, that faint scent of normalcy amidst chaos. The ticking clock synchronized with his beating heart—a metronome of unease.
“She hates it, you know,” Anne’s voice cut through the silence, light yet burdened.
He glanced at her, noting the strain etched into the fine lines around her eyes. “Hates what, Anne?”
“Waking up to that,” she gestured towards the disappointing tea. A humorless smile played on her lips, a soft shield against an undercurrent of worry. “To a life on pause. You, us, this… house arrest masquerading as peace.”
Harold let the words hang in the air, thick as winter fog. “It’s for safety, they say,” he replied, an excuse masked as consolation. But the truth, like the unsaid, was bitter. The ever-present military checkpoints, the curfews—signs of security turned invisible chains. His rank, ironically, set his family inside these walls.
“Sophie misses you.” Anne’s voice was a thread pulling him back, tangling his thoughts even tighter.
His daughter, wide-eyed and curious. “I miss her too,” he whispered, though quiet was his need to believe it. What place had a soldier at a breakfast table during war? His mind fled to the frontline—a pillow damp with sweat, soft under a helmet, dangerous in its deceit of comfort and security. 安全的pillow, a nesting place for restless dreams that lingered longer than desired.
“The world shifts when we sleep,” mused Anne, breaking his reverie. “Have you ever noticed?” Her tone was a brush painting memories, intangible yet vivid.
Harold nodded, an absent response to her abstract gaze that saw more than he dared.
“What do you dream of?” Anne’s question hung there, a delicate interrogation veiled as idle curiosity.
Battlefields alight under a crimson sky, comrades lost to the folly of man, echoes resonating as phantoms. His thoughts marched to a rhythmic chaos, one he had learned to decipher yet never escape. “Just dreams,” he said finally.
“More livable than reality?” Anne probed, her curiosity unwavering.
“Sometimes,” he admitted. The truth gnawed, a paradox of longing for escape and the fear of returning from it, changed or unchanged.
Anne sighed, a soft revelation mingled with resignation. “Will you change it?”
There was no clear answer; the horizon line of his future blurred by the uncertain expanse of duty and desire. “I don’t know how,” he confessed, the weight of his honesty sinking deep into the small room.
“Find a way,” she urged, the command of a soul tired of waiting yet hopeful still. “For Sophie’s dreams, if not your own.”
Silence drew its curtain once more, insulating anguish and anticipation. Harold stood, absorbing the everyday battlefield, the hardest to navigate, the safest to lose.
Later, as the starless night enveloped their tiny world, he felt Anne’s hand slip into his. A fragile alliance. “Goodnight, Harold,” she murmured, and the words blanketed his unquiet thoughts with a warmth unfamiliar in the dark.
He lay awake, a soldier’s mind roaming under the starlit yoke, trapped between what was and what could never be. Bitter peace, a safe pillow of promises yet unfulfilled. The early dawn would break on a world unchanged, each straining heartbeat synchronized with time’s relentless march.
The world sifted through his dreams, a place where soldiers and fathers struggled to find sleep. But sleep was not safe, and never enough to hold a man from falling through.
In his heart, the war never ended.