I Can’t Follow You, My Friend

Brothers, comrades, friends—I must tell you!
Perhaps it is fear,
perhaps it is paranoia,
that I cannot follow you into the darkness.
Perhaps I am too weak to tread in your footsteps, which you left so clearly in the familiar dirt.
How much I envied your trip into the darkness! How badly I wanted to travel with you, to be a friendly face when the torches went out.
And how I wept for you when you left, and I was stranded, destined to spend the next years of my life trapped in this place.
I regret, with any will and any life left within me, that I cannot follow you my friend.

In my dreams, I see myself besides you, ready to march to our destinies
What I would give to die besides you.
Oh, what I would give to God if he had altered fate, and put me besides you,
my brother, my comrade, my friend.
We would have marched to the end, you and I, to defend what we were ordered to defend. But I know, that as you read this, you judge my will.
My will to fight—that is what is weak!
How can I fight, brothers, how?
How will I be able to stare into the eyes of my enemy as he died from wounds that I, myself, had inflicted?
How will I be able to tend to a fallen comrade, with who I had shared stories with not a day ago as his limbs bleed and his eyes glaze?
You may not want it, but I give you my apology for my weakness. ‘
Perhaps it is fate that I was not sent into the darkness with you. That is what I hope.
I cannot follow you, my friend, my comrade, but most of all, my brother.