Homecoming · 7:14am May 11th, 2019
The hardest battle a soldier fights is often the one he faces at home.
Homecoming is a story that I've wanted to tell for a long time, and it's very near and dear to my heart. It's special to me because, in a way, it is me. But it's also most of you. It's the average person trying to figure out where things stand when the world around them changes, and when people you care about have gone through things beyond your comprehension. All my stories draw on my own experiences in some fashion, but this one in particular hits close to home for reasons I'll elaborate on as the tale progresses.
I'm not exactly sure why I decided to publish the first couple chapters now (I've been sitting on them for longer than 14th Century Friar has existed), but it just seemed like the right time for some reason. Unlike most of my military stories, which are written to express war from a military perspective, Homecoming is meant to be a view of the horrors of war... from someone who never saw it firsthand.
The reader is supposed to go on a journey of discovery with Rarity; to come as an outsider looking in at the military life she was never a part of. Her friends have gone through things she can only imagine and, well, that won't ever change. That divide can never be crossed, and she feels guilty about it; guilty that she didn't suffer with them. Now she needs to figure out how to respond to things she never thought would come up in her life, and that's going to be a bittersweet experience. On one hand, there's no going back to the way things were. On the other hand, that doesn't mean there's no moving forward. Life is full of change, after all; some changes are just more dramatic and permanent than others.
On the other side of things is... well, I won't say too much about him yet, but he has his own things he needs to sort out. Two flawed people, encountering each other and needing to sort out what to do. Isn't that just life?
Ultimately, Homecoming is a story of love, friendship, heartache, and hope. It's about living well even when death has defined so much of your life. The conflicts here aren't world-shattering or cataclysmic. They're the everyday struggles of ordinary people dealing with their own worlds being turned upside-down and having to roll with the punches.
It's a story about Rarity.
But it's also about me.
And it's also about you.
Which one has the right I wonder? Aiet, that the both of them are true, twinned sides of a coin. Honor to the man who chooses to flip that coin.
Thank you for putting this story up, your stories help many of us to realize and consider the other important facets of life and experience that exists in our society but often go unnoticed. All while being dang good writing. God bless you.