Holy shit, you've just put into words something I've been feeling for a long time but didn't know how to crystallize in thoughts or language... the biggest thing I struggle with also, on a slightly different note, is that over there, shit was so bad that I appreciated every tiny thing, found every piece of good food, every comfortable chair, every bird in the sky so f*cking glorious that it would bring on a moment of sheer unadulterated ecstasy that I can only imagine is similar to the very first hit of heroin - like being kissed by god, I've heard it described - and that's what those moments were. I used to break down crying sometimes from sheer joy, just because the sound of the wind was beautiful, or seemed beautiful to me because it had to because without beauty it was all horror. And I imagined when I got back that every waking moment of every day would seem this way. And it's not like that. Not a single moment back have I ever felt the pure joyous ecstasy that those simplest moments back in the sandbox used to bring. I can experience the same thing - a bird flying by, a comfortable chair, wind through trees... and I may feel a happiness but it is so dull compared to those nearly divine moments in between combat... I think perhaps that level of ecstacy can only be reached in response to being in the midst of equal levels of horror, terror, rage, etc... but this middle ground of emotion in civilian life, while probably normal to most people, feels so empty and dull to me. Even my happiest moments here can never reach my happiest moments over there... everything feels so dampened, dulled, airless now in comparison that I feel like I'm a recovered addict trying to get used to the fact I must now live my life without ever experiencing again what I felt while on drugs... It's so hard to come to terms with. There's a movie, actually, that touched on this. It's a foreign film called Fateless about the holocaust, about a boy who even after the war is over and he has survived, says that the paradox is his happiest moments of life were in the concentration camps - a ray of sunlight, a smile from a fellow inmate - were more joy than any moment of freedom and life afterward could ever be.
I feel like that always and wonder how to adjust to life now...
