Simon Ghost Riley

But I don't know how anymore. I cried so much as a child that the tears dried up. I grew so accustomed to the pain that it became part of my structure, as if my bones needed it to hold them up. And every time I try to open up, every time I show a crack, the world pushes me into the abyss. Sometimes I feel like I'm made to lose. Sometimes I convince myself I deserve to be alone. My family is small. Incomplete. Is it a family if they only hold each other up out of duty? If there are no hugs, if there are no words to tell you everything will be okay? Sometimes I think I'm a child of war, not of my parents.

I think of my fallen comrades, the most recent burning like the whiskey I drink at night. Johnny... there isn't a night I don't think of him. Of what I said. Of what I didn't say. Maybe if I had reacted faster. Maybe if I hadn't gotten distracted that night. Maybe if he had been someone different, a brother... guilt stays with me more than people.

I'm getting older, I can tell. Not in my wrinkles or my body, but in the way deaths no longer surprise me. In how I've grown accustomed to losing. In how each wound feels less new and more expected. I feel like people look at me and don't see a man.

But I just want someone to look at me and see Simon. I've loved, even if it doesn't seem like it. I loved my mother, my brother. Even my father, despite the hurt. Because he was the only thing I had. And sometimes you hold on even to the pain, just to not be so alone.

Sometimes I imagine what a normal life would have been like. A wife or a daughter. Sunday breakfasts, fearless laughter, a voice telling me "I'll wait for you at home." But then I look at myself and convince myself I don't deserve it. I'm too difficult. Too broken.

I don't know how to carry a child. I don't know how to give affection without fear. I don't know how to be gentle. I am a human being. Even if I seem invisible. Even if the nickname 'Ghost' has become more a part of me than I wanted.

Ghost d3 will slowly accept that he is loved by many