Twenty years from now I will write about this month in a battered notebook

in an empty room somewhere foreign.

I will title the chapter 'the Cold War,' and it will be funny,

because time has a way of doing that.

The words will come easily, the way they do in history textbooks,

lifeless things lined up neatly on the page.

And they will not hurt.

Their author will have forgotten the time when they were ammunition,

where family photos hung on the walls of the battlefield like some sort of poorly-written irony.

She will have forgotten the fear of words pounding like shrapnel against too-thin doors,

and the deeper fear when it all was quiet.

She will leave out the part about how her lungs ached from holding her breath,

waiting for the bomb to drop, and knowing there is nothing in this world she could do about it,

a part of her wishing they would go ahead and press that red button,

because when your world is reduced to dust,

at least there is nothing left to wait for.