They Let Me Live

"The friend-guild shows up for all kinds of people in need. We're visiting nurses. We're aid advocates. We're often first responders. My grandma lost her legs to a mine in the Horrors, and there wasn't enough medicine to keep it from getting a lot worse. I volunteered when I was sixteen so I could be the one appointed to feed her and bathe her, because she found it more dignified when it was family. She spent her last years in pain, but the guy who laid the mine? Who knows if they'll ever think about it? What would it change, if they did? The mine was laid. We can disarm the mines, we can demolish the munitions factories, we can even abolish war itself, but there was no restoring her. We have to live with the damage. We have to live in reality."