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The Walking Wounded

When people talk about 'the walking wounded', they normally think of soldiers returning from a battlefield.  I usually think of a war poem I studied in university... Wilfred Owen's 'Dulce Et Decorum Est'.  Oh man, that was such a gory poem.  I could actually hear the sounds of the wounds... viscera spilling out into the open where it was never meant to be...

But today I am thinking of different 'walking wounded'.  In my many years of navigating the morass of relationships, I have been continually astonished by the level of woundedness I have encountered in people I meet.  They walk upright and smile when they would and sleep when they should... but they carry such deep injuries within.  I almost wish they had physical injuries instead... at least these injuries would be exposed to the air and dried sooner or later.  But emotional and mental injuries can live forever within psyches.  Like an abscess, they sit inert but causing pain.  And these wounds continue poisoning the people... causing new friendships to be ruined and new hopes to be dashed.

Sometimes I feel drawn to these people... and it is almost as if I can hear them crying out for help.  The problem is when I reach out to help (even though I have no idea what to do), their automatic reaction is to snarl back and flash their claws.  And what makes things sadder is that they may even hurt their loved ones, causing fresh wounds themselves. 

:`(
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